Skinny Love: The Annotated Lyrics

Skinny Love
1. His love is skinny, skating on thin ice.
2. Her love is skinny, always close to giving out.
3. His beloved is skinny (and drinks too much); singularly, perhaps endearingly so.

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

(Hang in there, it’ll get better. Pour a little salt for luck, we’ll leave this dark place behind. (Or pour a little salt on the wound, as if our love never mattered.) Our protective veneer has been destroyed. I can’t stop looking at the wreckage.)

I 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 the moment this order's tall

(I don’t want her pity but the thought of losing her frightens me.)

I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be balanced
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

(He resorts to hectoring. Fine=okay, alright. She has trashed the relationship beyond repair. It’ll never be the same.)

Come on skinny love what happened here
Suckle on the hope in lite brassiere
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Sullen load is full; so slow on the split

(Nourish your love on my skinny chest; or she’s taken up with a lesbian with small breasts. I still want you even if I know I should split.)

I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be balanced
I told you to be kind
Now all your love is wasted?
Then who the hell was I?
Now I'm breaking at the britches
And at the end of all your lines

(Now you’re bitter. It’s not going your way. And now I'm getting fat eating my despair and cringing inside each time you speak.)

Who will love you?
Who will fight?
Who will fall far behind?

(What will happen to us? Who will love you, if not me? Which of us will fight for our love? Who will give up first?)

By Bon Iver
1. In French Bon=Good.
2. In Seattle Iver=Ivar’s Fish & Chips
3. So Bon Iver is a Good Fish.

The performance is singer-songwriterly minimal: a jangly old Silvertone guitar with an echoey metallic sound and Justin Vernon’s thin tenor. His tone is pleading except in the “I told you….” verses when he bites off the lines in exasperation. It’s one of those kinds of songs almost impossible not to sing along to, even when the lyrics strike you as obtuse. Like a James Taylor tune. So “Skinny Love” is Bon Iver’s “Fire and Rain.”