Elvis Costello / In Motion Pictures / 1999
She
tender, wistful, quietly reverent
This is Costello's recording of a song originally written by Charles Aznavour, best known in English through Herbert Kretzmer's lyric. It's a meditation on the impossibility of fixing a beloved woman into a single image, built almost entirely from paired opposites that never resolve into a stable portrait. The speaker ends up loving the contradiction itself rather than any one version of her.
the elusiveness of the beloved identity as multiplicity devotion despite uncertainty memory and loss the gap between appearance and interior life
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses the listener (not directly the woman) about a woman who has shaped his life; he is admiring and devoted but admits he cannot fully know or contain her, which gives the voice a gentle, somewhat helpless honesty.
What happens
The song doesn't tell a story in linear time so much as accumulate impressions. It opens by proposing she might be a fixed memory, then immediately complicates that with a string of contradictory possibilities—pleasure and regret, beauty and beast, heaven and hell. A middle section shifts to a more specific observation about her public happiness masking private grief, hinting at real emotional distance or hidden pain. The final section resolves not by pinning her down but by declaring that whatever she is, she is the organizing principle of his existence.
How it's built
The song is built almost entirely on anaphora, with nearly every line beginning the same way, functioning like a litany or catalogue rather than a conventional verse-chorus structure. This repetition creates a hypnotic, incantatory feel appropriate to a song about an unresolvable subject. The one structural break comes in the section describing her hidden crying, which shifts from abstract paradox to a single grounded image, before the song returns to its cataloguing mode and closes on the repeated single-word refrain that gives the song its title.
Section by section
Opening lines
The song begins tentatively, proposing she might simply be a lingering memory, immediately hedged with the possibility that the feeling attached to that memory could be pleasure or its opposite. This hesitation sets the tone: definition by way of undoing definition.
First catalogue of paradoxes
“the beauty or the beast”
The listing accelerates into more dramatic and mythic pairings, moving from mild ambivalence to extremes. Framing her as capable of being either monstrous or beautiful pushes the paradox toward something closer to awe than simple romantic uncertainty.
The private grief passage
Here the song narrows its lens from abstraction to a specific, almost narrative detail: a woman who performs happiness publicly while guarding her sorrow from view. This is the emotional hinge of the song, suggesting the speaker's love is partly built on witnessing what others cannot see, even if he too is excluded from full access to her interior life.
Closing declaration
“the meaning of my life”
The accumulated uncertainty resolves not into a clear answer but into total commitment; the speaker stops trying to define her correctly and instead asserts that his life's meaning is bound to her regardless. The repeated single word at the very end functions as both title and final surrender of the cataloguing impulse.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated opening word driving almost every line creates a chant-like momentum and reinforces that the song's real subject is the act of trying to define her, not any single definition.
- antithesis
- The lyric constantly pairs opposites—joy and sorrow, beauty and monstrousness, heaven and hell—refusing to let any single quality dominate, which enacts the theme of her essential unknowability.
- extended metaphor
- She is likened across the song to natural and seasonal phenomena, to reflections and mirrors, and to abstract forces like fate, building a cumulative sense that she exceeds any one comparison.
- volta
- The turn toward describing her concealed tears marks a shift from playful paradox to something more vulnerable and specific, deepening the emotional stakes just before the closing declaration.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as being about the inadequacy of language and memory to capture a real, complex person—every metaphor offered is immediately undercut or paired with its opposite, which suggests genuine humility rather than indecision. A secondary reading, given the song's history as a romantic standard, takes it more simply as an old-fashioned declaration of total devotion, where the piling up of contradictions is really just an extended way of saying she contains everything to him. Both readings can coexist; the song's plainness of form allows it to work as a straightforward love song while still supporting the more melancholy reading of unknowability and loss.
Context
This song is a well-known standard, originally written and performed by Charles Aznavour, with the widely sung English lyric adapted by Herbert Kretzmer; it became especially famous through Elvis Costello's version, recorded for the 1999 film Notting Hill and included on the soundtrack album In Motion Pictures. Costello did not write the song's lyric himself, so this analysis treats the words as a text he is interpreting and performing rather than authoring, which is worth keeping in mind when discussing intent.
Listen for
- the steady repetition of the opening word driving the song's rhythm and logic
- the shift in tone when the lyric turns to her hidden crying
- how the melody and phrasing handle the extreme pairings without ever landing on resolution
- the way the closing lines slow down and isolate the title word as a kind of exhale
About Elvis Costello
Declan Patrick MacManus, known professionally as Elvis Costello, is an English singer, songwriter, record producer, author, and television host. According to Rolling Stone, Costello "reinvigorated the literate, lyrical traditions of Bob Dylan and Van Morrison with the raw energy and sass that were principal ethics of punk", noting the "construction of his songs, which set densely layered wordplay in an ever-expanding repertoire of styles".
b. 1954 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue