There’s a particular kind of faith the song is about — not religious faith, not optimism exactly, but the stubborn, almost irrational willingness to keep believing in someone who has given you very little cause to do so. It’s a song about the gap between what people do and what we tell ourselves about why they do it. And in the hands of Rickie Lee Jones, a singer who has spent her entire career mapping the emotional wreckage left by love and time, it lands as something close to a confession.
- “Reason to Believe” appears on The Devil You Know, released September 18, 2012.
- The track runs 5 minutes and 18 seconds, giving Jones room to fully inhabit the song’s emotional arc.
- The Devil You Know is a covers album, featuring Jones’s interpretations of songs by other writers.
- The album was released in 2012, more than three decades into Jones’s recording career.
A Cover That Becomes a Reckoning
“Reason to Believe” was written by Tim Hardin in the 1960s and has been covered dozens of times, most famously by Rod Stewart. That version turned it into something radio-friendly and bittersweet, a minor key pop lament with a singalong refrain. Jones strips that version of any comfort. Her reading doesn’t reach for warmth. It reaches for honesty, which is harder and less pretty.
What Jones does with a song she didn’t write is the same thing she’s always done: she finds the emotional center and refuses to look away from it. Where Stewart’s reading lets the listener feel a kind of nostalgic ache, Jones’s sits with the absurdity of the feeling itself. The question the song poses — how can you still believe in someone after everything — isn’t rhetorical in her version. She means it as a real question, one she seems genuinely uncertain how to answer.
The Weight of Five Minutes
At 5:18, this is a long performance, and the length is doing real work. Jones doesn’t rush through the lyric to get to resolution, because there isn’t one. The song circles. It returns to its central bewilderment again and again, and each return feels less like repetition and more like someone who can’t stop turning a problem over in their hands. Singer-songwriters from Joni Mitchell to Neko Case have understood that sometimes a song earns its length by refusing to provide the catharsis the listener expects. Jones does exactly that here.
The extra time also gives her phrasing room to breathe in ways that shorter versions don’t allow. There are silences in this recording that function almost like punctuation, pauses where the emotional weight of what she’s just sung has to settle before she can continue. That’s not padding. That’s a performer who understands what the song is actually about, and who respects the listener enough to let them feel it rather than just hear it.
Belief as Self-Deception, or Something Braver
The song’s central tension is whether the belief it describes is pathetic or admirable. The lyrics catalog the ways someone has let the narrator down, behavior that would, by any rational measure, eliminate any basis for trust, and then they ask how you’d still find a reason to believe. One reading is that it’s a portrait of self-deception, the kind of story we tell ourselves because the alternative is admitting that someone we love isn’t who we needed them to be.
But Jones’s performance suggests something more complicated. There’s a stubbornness in her delivery that doesn’t read as weakness. It reads as a choice, a conscious, costly decision to hold onto belief not because the evidence supports it but because the alternative is a kind of emotional surrender she isn’t willing to make. That’s not delusion. That’s a specific kind of dignity, and it’s the most interesting thing about the song in her hands.
What a Covers Album Says About an Artist
The Devil You Know arrives at a particular point in Jones’s career, and that context shapes how every song on it lands. By 2012 she’d been making records for over thirty years, which means she was choosing these songs with the full weight of her own catalog behind her. The songs she covers aren’t random selections. They’re songs that have something to say about love, loss, damage, and endurance, themes that have run through her own writing from the beginning.
Choosing “Reason to Believe” for that project is itself an interpretive act. It suggests that the question the song asks is one Jones is still sitting with, that the gap between what people do and what we believe about them hasn’t resolved itself into easy answers. That refusal to resolve is what keeps the song from feeling like a nostalgia exercise. It feels like a current preoccupation, which is exactly what the best cover versions do.
FAQ
What is “Reason to Believe” by Rickie Lee Jones about?
The song examines the stubborn, costly choice to keep believing in someone who has repeatedly let you down. Jones’s version treats that belief not as naive self-deception but as a conscious emotional position, one that costs something and says something about who the narrator chooses to be.
What album is “Reason to Believe” on?
“Reason to Believe” appears on The Devil You Know, a covers album released by Rickie Lee Jones on September 18, 2012.
Did Rickie Lee Jones ever explain the meaning of “Reason to Believe”?
“Reason to Believe” was written by Tim Hardin, not Jones. Her decision to record it for The Devil You Know is itself a statement of affinity with the song’s themes, which align closely with the emotional territory she has explored throughout her own songwriting career.
How does Rickie Lee Jones’s version of “Reason to Believe” differ from other famous covers?
Where Rod Stewart’s well-known version leans into warmth and a kind of bittersweet pop appeal, Jones’s reading is more austere and unsettled. She treats the song’s central question, how you sustain belief in someone who hasn’t earned it, as genuinely unresolved rather than as a romantic sentiment with a built-in emotional release.
There’s something that doesn’t age about a song willing to sit with a feeling rather than explain it away. “Reason to Believe” has survived decades of cover versions because the feeling it describes, that irrational, expensive loyalty to someone who hasn’t deserved it, is one of the most human things there is. Jones’s version on The Devil You Know earns its place in that lineage by treating the song with the seriousness it’s always warranted. She doesn’t dress it up or smooth it out. She just tells the truth, which is, as it turns out, more than enough.
More Rickie Lee Jones Song Meanings
- Comfort You Meaning
- St. James Infirmary Meaning
- The Weight Meaning
- Masterpiece Meaning
- Only Love Can Break Your Heart Meaning
Cara Whitfield has spent more years than she can count in record store back rooms and tiny venues, absorbing everything from post-punk to shoegaze to modern indie rock. She writes with the enthusiasm of a lifelong fan and the focus of someone who actually wants you to understand the song – not just enjoy it. Rock and alternative music is her home turf.