The song “Beyond Belief” on Elvis Costello’s album Imperial Bedrooms was written intentionally to be vague and disconcerting, but it was my third-highest song on Spotify Wrapped for good reason. The lyrics are masterful at entwining references and wordplay into a phrase loaded with meaning, but to get to the message of the whole song, you have to acknowledge that the depth of the song’s layers and lack of an ‘official’ theme means that each and every person comes up with their own explanations for the fantastical goings-on in this track. Here’s my take.

To me, this song is about the exhaustion of a repetitive life, and how the act of performatively doing the same things over and over invokes the fear of being trapped in that cycle forever. The first verse discusses this:

History repeats the old conceits

The glib replies the same defeats

Keep your finger on important issues

With crocodile tears and a pocketful of tissues

As history repeats itself, all those alive are expected to react emotionally just as people would have in the past. ‘Crocodile tears’ implies that the speaker is sick of that. They’re so numb to the constant loop that they don’t genuinely feel that emotion anymore. When the speaker looks around, they see others trapped in the same situation:

You’ll never be alone in the bone orchard

“Bone orchard” is a colloquial term for graveyard. The speaker is not alone in this cycle, because all those who have come before them are enshrined in history as an example for the modern society to follow. They’re dead, but the speaker can still feel their presence. This line also implies that the speaker will not be free from the repetition of history even when they’re dead and buried, increasing the feeling of being stifled that the song creates.

Now, the song transitions to a familiar scene: the speaker enters a bar and meets a woman. Here, the speaker continues to say ‘you:’ 

So in this almost empty gin palace

Through a two-way looking glass

You see your Alice

To me, the usage of ‘you’ feels like the speaker is mentally playing instructions. It’s a typical meeting. A guy meets a girl in a bar. It’s “nothing so novel.” The narration throughout the song begins to seem more and more like the speaker is experiencing the world as if nothing is new, and that all of their experiences are repeats of the same old story. The speaker flees the bar as they feel themself playing the part:

And now you find you fit this identikit completely

You say you have no secrets

And then leave discreetly

An identikit is a police sketch based on a witness description. The speaker’s world feels like it is happening to someone else in some other time, which is where the unreality themes begin to heavily affect the next verses:

Just like the canals of Mars and the Great Barrier Reef

I come to you beyond belief   

The ‘canals of Mars’ were a hoax created by accidental lines on early telescope lenses. The speaker switches to “I” here for the remaining duration of the song. They are now ‘beyond belief:” unreal, fantastical. They are tired:

I got a feeling

I’m going to get a lot of grief

Once this seemed so appealing

Now I am beyond belief

The speaker is fed up and exhausted with the way their life is going. They could accomplish anything if they put their mind to it, but the weight of repetition weighs on them. The world is empty and unreal and there are no new experiences. 

“Beyond Belief” truly is poetry in its wordcraft and the manipulation of the speaker’s personal pronoun usage. Elvis Costello never misses, and in the future I might try to do this analysis for other songs of his that I like: “Tart” and “God’s Comic.”