These Elvis Costello Lyrics From 1982 Anticipated His New Style

Inspect the careers of any great musical artist throughout history, and you’ll likely find someone who knew when it was time to change up their formula. Even when what they’d done before was working just fine, they made crucial adjustments.

Elvis Costello did just that on his 1982 album Imperial Bedroom. And he announced the change to the world with both the musical and lyrical approach of “Beyond Belief”, that album’s opening track.

“Belief” System

When Elvis Costello hired The Attractions as his backing band shortly after the release of his debut album My Aim Is True, he and his new cohorts quickly discovered their signature sound. It was dense, propulsive, and frenetic. And producer Nick Lowe didn’t gussy it up with too many technical frills.

But when Costello began writing for Imperial Bedroom, he realized that his material, inspired by romantic foibles and personal doubt, was much more nuanced than what he’d previously written. The songs required music that suggested and implied rather than declaimed and declared.

Costello decided to change producers. He went with Geoff Emerick, whose work as an engineer with The Beatles provided a framework for what he wanted to accomplish on the new album.

“Beyond Belief” started to come into focus once Attractions’ drummer Pete Thomas came up with a subtly slinky beat. The song also features special effects not normally heard on previous Costello records, including one section when his voice seems to indeed beam in from, as the lyrics suggest, “the canals of Mars and the Great Barrier Reef.”

Inspecting the Lyrics of “Beyond Belief”

“History repeats the old conceits,” Costello begins “Beyond Belief”. “The glib replies, the same defeats.” Those lines suggest a cycle where relationships, despite the instructive examples of the past, continuously and spectacularly flame out due to human frailty.

Even by Costello’s lofty standards, the wordplay in this song is staggeringly nimble. Time and again, he comes up with phrases, like “very fashionable hovel,” that upend expectations. Black humor surfaces throughout as well. “You’ll never be alone in the bone orchard,” he drily notes, referencing the company you keep when you’re dead and buried.

The perspectives change constantly. Occasionally, the narrator seems far removed from the damage being done. But then he suddenly and fervently asks, “Do you have to be so cruel to be callous?” “You say you have no secrets,” he complains to his companion. “Then leave discreetly.”

Time and again, Costello sadly marvels at the contradictions of it all. “All the ladies catcall and wolf-whistle,” he notes. “So-called gentlemen and ladies dogfight like rose and thistle.” When he moans in the refrain that “Now I am beyond belief,” it’s a sad admission that no one can be trusted when it comes to matters of the heart.

“Beyond Belief” set the tone for the remainder of Imperial Bedroom. That wonderful LP continued in the spirit of musical adventurousness and lyrical wizardry established by this magical song, one of Costello’s finest achievements.

(Photo by Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)