"Belinda Says" by Alvvays: A Track Review
Preface: if you haven’t heard of Alvvays or Blue Rev or this song, please read Carol Newhart’s beautiful 2023 review of Blue Rev!
To abide by tradition or to throw it all out the window? To let it all out or reel yourself in before you do something you can’t take back? To move to the country and have that baby or not? These questions are the crux of Alvvays’ exuberant-but-in-crisis power-pop anthem “Belinda Says.” Frontwoman Molly Rankin has quickly become one of my favorite songwriters and vocalists of all time, and “Belinda Says” is an emblem of everything I love about her artistry. Rankin has spoken in interviews about how this song is inspired by her own experiences growing up in rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. It is impossible to miss the song’s charming coastal Canadian references, from Blue Rev, the national treasure of an alcoholic malted beverage, to Inverness, the idyllic Nova Scotia town that the narrator of this song decides on as a final destination. “Belinda Says,” and Blue Rev as a whole, for that matter, are deeply anchored in a sense of place –– or lack thereof.
“Belinda Says” opens with a dreamlike piano introduction, but soon transitions into the complete opposite of what listeners would expect: a jarring, thrilling shift into electric guitar paired with Rankin’s first lines: “Can’t explain my ankle sprain, I didn’t really feel it / New dress, could turn your head, but how long till we reel it in?” The start of this song already creates a throughline of late-adolescent self-doubt and absentmindedness, but this theme of doubt intensifies by the second as we learn of the speaker’s disconnect between what she should want and how she feels. The line “paradise / and I find myself paralyzed” says so much in so few words: the uneasy feeling of a perfect place, relationship, or livelihood, the need to catch what is good but fleeting because soon it will be gone, and the newfound cynicism that comes with the realization that perhaps your dreams and ideals are not those things after all. I cannot imagine better production or instrumentation for this song. With its jangling golden guitar chords and soaring choruses, that dare you to say again how structured pop music can only be generic, the song feels simultaneously like retreating into childhood and preparing to enter the first day of the rest of your life. As the narrator moves through discontent with her surroundings and drops a reference to the malted staple of Canada (“Blue Rev behind the rink / I didn’t really need it”), she ultimately decides that she will find her way, however exhausted she may be. Subsequently, we are introduced to what I can only call the ‘climax’ of the story. If you tend to respond to your own doubts about whether something is right for you by immediately telling yourself over and over again that yes, this is right, you are in good company with both the writer of this review and the narrator of this song.
During the refrain of the song, our heroine deliberates a straightforward, traditional life path. Rankin sings, with a confounding mix of doubt and certainty, “Move into the country / gonna have that baby / wait tables in town / I know word gets around.” As the refrain progresses, our narrator tells us once again that she will indeed move into the country and have that baby. Her voice grows increasingly insistent: yes, this is what she’s meant to do. And you almost believe her, just as we almost believe ourselves when we try new ways of being, plotting out our futures, and trying to ignore that something does not quite add up. You believe her until you hear “and I find myself paralyzed, knowing all too well, terrified” immediately after this refrain, and you realize that she was just trying to say something until it felt true enough.
As the song moves up a whole step, Rankin belts with what seems like the most steadfast conviction, “I’ll egress to Inverness with nothing in my pocket,” yet there is a false confidence in that decisiveness. The biggest a-ha moment of this song comes in the form of a lyric that probably dethrones every other Rankin lyric that I love: “Belinda says that heaven is a place on earth, but so is hell.” This perfect retort is a reference to Belinda Carlisle’s 1970s earworm “Heaven Is A Place On Earth,” and the thesis statement of “Belinda Says.”
This track is, at its core, a song about a young woman realizing she is at the cusp of motherhood, fearing that “word [will get] around” in her hometown about this new development in her life, and eventually fleeing to the coastal countryside to start a new life despite being laden with doubt. It is such a place-specific and detail-oriented song, but Rankin is a master of blending the personal and universal, so it is impossible for me not to apply it to my own life as a 19-year-old college sophomore trying to ascertain what feels right to me, and what to do when I feel that changing. I will always love that the ending features the narrator deciding to “start another life” and leave us all hanging, without an idea of what comes next — those interpretations are up to us.
Another endorsement of this perfect song by Cam Gimbrere ‘27:
