Travis King7 July, 2013

L'appel du VideExistential Meaning in Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen

Popular song Call Me Maybe, performed by Carly Rae Jepsen, appears to be a zippy pop tune

about offering one's phone number to possible identity thieves. However, as Jepsen revealed in an

interview with Rolling Stone in their August 2012 issue, she does not elaborate on the full meaning of

her song, but states that she is puzzled by the popular interpretation that she is singing about making

herself relationally available to an attractive male. An analysis of the lyrics reveals that Call Me Maybe

uses a fall down a well as an analogy for emergence into the seemingly chaotic void of the cosmos.

The song opens with the line “I threw a wish in the well”. Jepsen acknowledges in her Rolling

Stone interview that the song's inspiration came from a well near her Springfield, Illinois home, which

is now out of use and it known in local tradition to be a “wishing well”, into which one throws a coin

and silently makes a wish as the coin falls. Jepsen does not reveal her wish, as it is believed that telling

your wish to others will cause it to not be realized, as is referenced in her hit single Call Me Maybe (©

Universal Music Publishing Group) with the line “Don't ask me, I'll never tell”. However, tradition

does not dictate that inferring the wish of another person will prevent it from realization, hence the

justification of the following speculation.

The second stanza of the song states “I trade my soul for a wish”. The gravity of this wish is

clear from the strong language of trading one's soul. Though the song states that she was trading

“Pennies and dimes for a kiss”, a literal kiss cannot be her wish, as she previously stated that her wish

would not be revealed in the song. Whatever her wish, it is clear that it is not answered in the way

which she expected, thus the lines “I wasn't looking for this / But now you're in my way”. It is here that

the song begins to use the analogy of a male figure in the vicinity of Jepsen. This is obviously not a

literal male, as that would betray the allegorical nature of the song. The nature of her wish, and of this

Other-figure, are revealed in the chorus of the song.

The second line of the chorus states “Here's my number / So call me maybe”. What do numbers

have to do with wishes? The answer can be found in the person of Pythagoras, an ancient Greek

philosopher, religious sect leader, and discoverer of the Pythagorean theorem. Pythagoras believed that

every force and object in the universe could be explained using a whole-number ratio. Mathematical

operations were used by the Pythagoreans as religious devices and mathematics was seen as a form of

divination. Jepsen, who earned her BA in History at Illinois State University, is surely familiar with

these facts, and thus her reference to “my number” most likely refers to a representation of herself in

totality. Thus her “wish” is revealed: she presents her being to this Other-figure, the mathematical

Newtonian clockwork universe, expecting an answer that is personally fulfilling.

Her wish is, however, not fulfilled in the manner which she anticipates. She is suddenly faced

with the chaotic nature of her situation: she is wearing ripped jeans, her skin is showing (a dual

reference to both innocence and maturity), the weather is hot, and a strong wind is blowing. She

becomes aware of a deep urge to jump into the well, an urge described in French as l'appel du vide, or

the call of the void. She sings, “You took your time with the call / I took no time with the fall / You

gave me nothing at all / But still you're in my way”. She does not fall into the literal well, but she does

“fall” into her current understanding of the cosmos as encompassing both order and chaos. She

acknowledges that she cannot peer into the depths of the “well” (“It's hard to look right / At you baby”.

This understanding is both a sacrifice (giving her “nothing at all”) but also a privilege of adulthood.

Her new cosmological perspective at first inspires a desire to commit theft as a rebellion against

meaningless synthetic institutions such as currency and Wilfred's Corner Store (Springfield, IL Police

Arrest Records, 2008).

Jepsen's love of singing helped her rise above both her criminal phase as well as her deep

despair at her loss of objective meaning, and she now states of this existential revelation, “Before you

came into my life I miss you so bad”. She continues to frame her perspective as an objective, personal

Other, and uses the phrase “my number”, as a retrospective call to her former self, wishing that she had

made her “wish in the well” sooner.

In summary, Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe continues in a tradition of layers of musical

meaning surpassing public understanding, and with details revealed in her interview with Rolling Stone

we can infer that her song refers to a “coming of age” experience in her life, in which she was forced to

reevaluate her assumptions about the nature of the cosmos. Before this experience she believed that

reality was explainable in quantified terms, using the phrase “my number” to refer to the whole-number

ratio that she, like Pythagoras, believed was the full expression of her existence. After an experience in

which she looks into a well, symbolizing both the void of deep space and the void of natural

understanding, and cannot resist the urge to “fall”, coming into her new belief that reality is

unknowable and has no objective meaning that is discernible to humans. The popular belief that this

song is about dating is likely due to the fact that she uses the image of a male figure to represent her

changing view of reality. Though Call Me Maybe has a cheerful tune and lively beat, it represents the

very human struggle of whether to find a purpose, or to question purpose itself.