Beyond Love

Here is my personal analysis of the song and my version of its lyrics after listening very carefully:

Beyond love The first thing I do before I get into your house I’m gonna tear off all the petals from the rose that’s in your mouth

(She wants to remove the artifice and cliches of love, and dig deeper by ripping away the facade of romance)

Beyond love You wanted to find Elvis and I didn’t understand They take the simple things inside you and put nightmares in your hands

(She uses another cliche of romance here—the figure of Elvis as a heartthrob. His good looks, his swinging hips. But who is the real and aching human behind this slick image? Where is the genuine love behind the plushy red velvet hearts which are marketed to us on Valentine’s Day? The nightmare in this case refers to the gross superficiality which is often called love by an almost purely materialistic culture)

Beyond love This thing comes to me: Heartbreak did this He was made to believe That he should live without it

(Now it seems she is speaking more directly about a real person she loves—a man who cannot love her back because maybe he has fallen victim to the superficiality of another's love and no longer trusts it can be genuine)

All I know is what I see No changing this Visions born in the dreams of a world left without it

(She is defiant against his apathetic nature towards love. She will not shift her viewpoint. She will not accept the idea of a reality in which real love does not exist. She has tasted real love--indeed she knows it beyond its cliches and wants to convince this person in her life of its reality)

We really want to know We really do breathe We really do breathe We really want to know

(It sounds now as if she has shifted her perspective once more to that of all the creatures on Earth--we want to know if life beyond real love is endurable? What would this world look like without it?)

The last thing that she sees before they turn off all lights Was there a net up in the corner with the spiders made of lies?

(This part fascinates me most. This image of a net of spiders in the corner of a room harkens back to the monsters many of us see in childhood before we shut our eyes to go to sleep. We imagine things in the dark that aren’t really there. But we believe them to be there, and so they become our reality and are able to haunt and torment us with their illusory though very “real feeling” nature. Just like love. We can believe the gross fantasy and be reduced to emotional rubble through its lies, or we can see if it is possible to understand what love is beyond its many false and rather terrifying faces.

We really want to know — Beyond love? All I know is what I see And you can’t live without this Could you ever believe — Beyond love?

I really want to know I really want to know

...

The song itself brings to mind a quote from James Baldwin:

"Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonest... the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mark of cruelty."

I'm sure it's agree not grieve.