When Birdy entered the music scene many years ago with her remarkable 2011 reinterpretation of Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love,” she rightly cut through the noise. The song is full of the reality of emotional collapse amidst fragile attachments and she captures this essence starkly:
There is a notable intelligence to the whole production, including the haunting visuals of the video in an old, empty house with a melancholy breeze moving through lace curtains and hanging trinkets while Birdy plays on an abandoned piano.
Particularly due to her audible youth (she was fifteen at the time of recording and still had her braces), the song’s heavy lyrics paired with her inescapably beautiful, sparse piano arrangement immediately gripped listeners:
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
The juxtaposition of marked innocence and youth with the sometimes violent imagery of the original track creates an entrancing, poetic experience where the grief and longing of destroyed relationships become a universal language.
For example, while she has an exquisite voice, there are obvious, youthful vocal weaknesses present out of which she will later grow, but these only add to the charm, and communicate a halting vulnerability that is the stripped-bare inner experience of every broken heart.
Bon Iver’s original version also has this vulnerability present, but it takes a different form, closer to the flattened, bone-dry detachment we find in a lot of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Although this delivery is closer to the bone of long-term disappointment and grief, Birdy’s interpretation somehow feels like the more honest one. Jason Vernon, the singer and writer, sings in such a way that a person could change the lyrics to something less devastating and the song could stand.
There is no possibility of that in Birdy’s interpretation, although Bon Iver’s offers something different, showing Birdy’s subsequent performance to be profoundly complementary: the layer of reality that most adults live in, where we downplay the things of greatest emotional significance in order to make them bearable.
Birdy’s interpretation serves as the hidden truth of the unguarded heart behind closed doors, and Vernon’s reveals the accurate way it usually comes out.
The intensity of the lyrics and periodic moments of Vernon’s emphatic vocal-throwing—especially around the alliterative “who the hell was I?”—give this tension away:
And now all your love is wasted
And then who the hell was I?
And I’m breaking at the breaches
And at the end of all your lines
What we see captured by the writer and by both performances is the ache in the wake of a shattering relationship, where someone’s chaos increasingly makes love impossible. The song is a pleading with this broken person to come around and see how much is being asked—and eventually lost to both of them—through this chaos.
Although much of the lyrical content is ultimately mysterious and a kind of cloaking over the emotional events that precipitated the unravelling of the romance, the song’s main evocative phrase, “skinny love,” is a strong, symbolic tell.
Will this starving love outlast the next few months?
It is apparent the question is rhetorical. Vernon makes this plain by the end with three haunting questions, after many other desperate questions throughout the song:
Who will love you?
Who will fight?
Who will fall far behind?
“Skinny Love,” brought so strongly to the cultural fore in large part because of Birdy’s version, is a rare continuation of the emotional and interior depth intrinsic to songwriting prior to the digital age around the year 2000.
Although the last few decades have largely seen drift in the mainstream cultural cache from that original depth, writers like Vernon still operate within that tradition. We perhaps have Birdy to thank for translating it most effectively out to a mainstream audience, proving the persistent hunger in the human heart for thoughtful, real art that soberly and sincerely engages reality, regardless of what trends in current popular culture.
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