In love, we all go through shitty times. I ghostwrite papers for the college students who work for me using my experiences. Anyway, I wrote a paper for a person in a creative writing class at UMass. They had to pick a song and analyze its lyrics. So, I chose this…

Lyrical interpretation: “Skinny Love” by Bon Iver

Clearly, it’s about a love gone sour. However, I think he is singing to himself, not his partner. That’s just the vibe I get from the song. Of course, everyone has his or her own interpretation of a song’s lyrics. That’s what makes music so extraordinary. Each person can hear a song, and it affects them in a completely different way. Getting back to the point, what do the song lyrics mean? Instead of giving a line-by-line interpretation of each lyric, I think it’s more effective to explain what goes through my mind when I hear the song than to try to offer insight into what the artist meant when he wrote each line. So, here it is…

I think love is a rolling history for most of us, and once we get the taste of it, we never stop to breathe. Throughout life, we generally go from one relationship to the next, neither healing nor bothering to figure out what went wrong in the last one. More often than not, we never even stop to think about who we have become in the process of each failure. We just tend to incorporate the ghosts of everyone we have ever been with and the ghosts of everyone we have ever been ourselves into who we are now. The majority of people pretend to live in the present tense. Don’t get me wrong. It’s the “healthy” thing to do. Everyone should try to look forward like a racehorse. If you can’t, a pill will always help you do that. Sadly, most of us know what it’s like to stumble through today while living in yesterday. We just tend not to talk about it on social media. No one does. Everyone acts like they are okay, which may make us feel even more lonely. Anyway, I suppose intelligent people learn to compartmentalize early on and just simply file everything away into its proper place. They are a lucky lot, indeed. The rest of us seem to have this disaster inside us that we call a heart. More often than not, the heart is a living, ticking graveyard full of not-so-forgotten faces and over-agonized personal mistakes that keep the past ever-present. I have always felt the naive will blindly blame others for their hurt, and the self-deprecating will always staunchly blame themselves.
They say the truth in any argument generally lies in the middle, but that isn’t true. Truth is found in the bathroom mirror while you wash your face. Yes. The bathroom mirror is the indifferent scale that holds the weight of your soul in its reflection. It doesn’t bother to differentiate between the damage others have done to you, the damage you’ve done to others, or the damage you’ve done to yourself. It’s all in your eyes. If you stare into the mirror long enough, I believe you will inherently know which way that scale tips. You will just know. In the end, we just know, and it weighs on us because usually, the person we have to blame for all of our problems is staring back at us. It’s not an exact science or anything. Still, I have learned that, with practice, this unique theory of weights and measures is very helpful in calculating exactly how much one needs to drink to sleep without dreaming. The older I get, the more I consider sleep without dreams the most invaluable commodity. That’s what the song is about to me. Lyrics to follow.

“Skinny Love”
Come on skinny love just last the year
Pour a little salt, we were never here
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer
Tell my love to wreck it all
Cut out all the ropes and let me fall
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Right in this moment this order’s tall
And I told you to be patient
And I told you to be fine
And I told you to be balanced
And I told you to be kind
In the morning I’ll be with you
But it will be a different kind
I’ll be holding all the tickets
And you’ll be owning all the fines
Come on skinny love, what happened here?
Suckle on the hope in lite brassieres
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Sullen load is full, so slow on the split
And I told you to be patient
And I told you to be fine
And I told you to be balanced
And I told you to be kind
And now all your love is wasted
And then who the hell was I?
And I’m breaking at the britches
And at the end of all your lines
Who will love you?
Who will fight?
Who will fall far behind?
Ooh, ooh