The Private Canon: Bruised and Suspended in "Still Too Soon to Know"

This post is part of a series.

I've written recently about Elvis Costello's compulsive wordiness, and how it has sometimes led his music within shouting distance of hip-hop (along those lines, this stunning new track from his forthcoming album, co-written with Michael Leonhart, has what I'm pretty sure is a first for him: a guest rap break, in this case courtesy of JSWISS). But he can do quality as well as quantity, and he's no slouch with jazz-standard-worthy compression and economy when he wants to be: "Almost Blue," "Stranger in the House," "Baby Plays Around," "Alison," "Why?"

One overlooked gem in this vein is hiding amid a series of spectacularly wordy rockers on 1994's underrated Brutal Youth (his second to last with the Attractions). "Still Too Soon to Know" is a blue-flame torch song he could have given to Roy Orbison, with its slow '50s beat and strategically placed leaping intervals over a simple progression clouded by the occasional passing minor chord. The song feels bruised, suspended, which fits a lyric describing a unique liminal moment, the recoil before a body blow: It is just after our narrator has discovered his lover's infidelity but before the big fight or split-up. The title is thus applied in answer to a series of questions ("Do you love him?" "Are you sorry?" "Will you stay or will you go?").

The music Costello uses to convey this miniature tragedy is as simple and incisive as the lyrics. I would just point to two things I notice that help to bring it home. One is the precipitous drop of the melody at the end of each verse's fourth line, whose hushed solemnity, even hesitation, suggest a small *gulp* of contained emotion. It follows a series of downward drops and a big climb-up, but drops down further, a sixth, into almost a different vocal register:

The self-quieting inward turn signified by that descent, falling immediately down from the melody's G-flat peak, gets me every time, not least because it sharpens the impact of the lyrics it accompanies: Not just "warning" but "For it was in the way that he came close to...touching you" (with an extra note in the melody here), and finally, devastatingly: "If I wasn't happy then, I never will be."

One other musical element that subtly reinforces the song's emotional pull is the irregular shape of the verse form. Following the neat eight above are just six bars, with the title line wrapping up the cadence early, as if to dam feelings that would otherwise pour out. You can see it in the way the A-flat chord slides in and breaks the song's chord pattern, which otherwise waits two measures for a change:

A brief, anguished bridge lays out the stay-or-go dilemma in as few words as possible, returning to the song's peak note (a G-flat) over a chord change on each measure, which for this song makes it feel practically manic. Then it slumps back to the resignation of the final shattering verse, in which our singer admits not only that he suspected nothing about his lover's wandering heart—he was, for his part, genuinely in love, and now he's not sure in what sense, if any, that feeling was real. The final question and answer are for himself:

When I think back a couple of days
If I wasn't happy then, I never will be
I wonder was this ignorance or bliss?
It's still too soon to know

God, how painfully well I know this feeling. Without getting overly autobiographical here, let's just say that the question of whether a breakup retroactively poisons everything that came before has been one I've lived personally, and I suspect most of us have in some form or other. (Come to think of it, Costello has a sort of flip-side scenario on the same record: the horny regret of would-be lovers in "Just About Glad.") Lots of writers can write kiss-off breakup songs or jealous rants—indeed, Costello is a past master at every flavor of relationship ender. But I don't think I've ever heard anyone tackle the special dislocation of pre-regret (pregret?), of staring into a future already diminished by the lie you've been living, as directly and mournfully as Costello does in this small, perfectly formed playlet. It gets me every time, but then it doesn't take much to break me in two.