The Sundays - Skin And Bones
“Skin And Bones” is the first song on Reading Writing And Arithmetic, and the quiet, slow-motion divebomb of David Gavurin’s guitar raises the curtain on what is undoubtedly one of the best albums I’ve ever heard in my life. I was in the first blush of my Smiths fandom at the time I bought this record, and I found a lot of similarities between the sound of The Smiths and The Sundays. Harriet Wheeler’s voice is far more conventionally beautiful than Morrissey’s idiosyncratic baritone, but David Gavurin’s ringing, sliding, undistorted guitar notes closely approximate the sort of single-note melodies that were Johnny Marr’s stock in trade. Wheeler’s voice may be far different from Morrissey’s, but her lyrics are close reflections of the ones he wrote, both in their emotional openness and honesty and in their awkwardness, and use of wit to cover it. For a shy, bookish teenager to find common ground with both bands is not at all surprising.
Before I go on, a disclaimer: the depth of my devotion to the Sundays has been all but unequalled for nearly 20 years, and therefore, I fear that a lot of what I’m about to say will be review for those who’ve followed what I’ve been writing for a long time. This is one of those bands that I keep coming back to. I keep trying to encapsulate all that they mean to me in words, which never feel adequate to contain my emotions. I keep running over the same moments in their discography, trying over and over to pin down what’s so great about them. “Skin And Bones” is a song I’ve written about before in multiple venues. And I don’t have too much self-esteem about my writing (or anything else, really), so a lot of times I tell myself that no one is reading anything I write anywhere. At the same time, I fear that some people might be, and they might be annoyed with me for repeating myself. I probably worry too much. But if I weren’t in that sort of mood tonight, chances are I wouldn’t be listening to The Sundays in the first place. So I’m going to try to go on, and to avoid any further self-absorbed digressions.
Harriet Wheeler begins this song conversationally, launching into the lyrics with an interjection. “You know,” she begins, “I’ve been wondering…” Then, in a sort of verbal hesitation, she goes back to the interjection. “You know… all the way home.” Her thought processes seem jumbled in this first verse, her sentence structure choppy and broken up with the sort of verbal tics that, if we’re honest, we have to admit litter all of our attempts at conversational speech. It’s hard to talk, a lot of times, especially when you’re trying to say something important. You beat around the bush, you hesitate, maybe you even stop entirely. Wheeler isn’t going to stop, though, and the band playing behind her will help keep her going, with Paul Brindley and Patrick Hannan’s steady rhythm providing gentle musical encouragement. David Gavurin’s guitar is a more restless presence, his sliding guitar leads wandering up and down the fretboard, stopping and starting in counterpoint to Wheeler’s voice, as if he’s giving musical voice to the same hesitant train of thought that she’s trying to speak aloud. Wheeler’s manner of delivering the lyrics attempt to camouflage the import of what she’s saying with a tossed-off manner of speaking, but Gavurin’s guitar underscores the emotion that is at the center of it all, no matter how much she tries to hide it.
I’m going to put forth my own theory right here, and dispense with any concerns for authorial intent: this is a song about depression. More specifically, it’s a song about being concerned with whether the sort of import one often attaches to one’s own life is justified. What does it matter if we’re all going to die and rot beneath the earth? This is a question Harriet Wheeler never asks. But if you listen closely, those thoughts are there, under the surface. To me, the most significant group of lines in the song comes towards the end of the first verse. “You see me in a cardigan,” she says, speaking to some unseen interrogator, “and a dress that I’ve been sick on.” She stumbles over the word dress, repeating it three times, sounding nervous but at the same time playing her own clumsiness for laughs. Previously, she’s informed us that she’s “had it so good,” but by contrast, behaved loathsomely and wasted her time with vanity. “How are you?” she asks. “I can’t say I really care at the end of it all.” For two decades, I’ve wondered who she’s really dismissing with that last line. Is it the person she’s talking to, or herself? Or both? She spends the whole first verse putting herself down, and despite delivering the line about the vomit on her dress as if it’s a big joke, there’s obviously some real frustration for anyone who will describe themselves as having responded to comfortable circumstances with loathsome vanity. And how vain can you possibly be when you’re still admitting that you’ve left vomit stains on the clothes you’re wearing?
But now the song moves into its chorus, and the tone kind of changes. Wheeler’s voice soars on its opening notes, as she declares, “There’s one thing I’ve found, it’s that we’re just flesh and blood.” This is the minimization of human accomplishments and human ego that I alluded to in the previous paragraph. David Gavurin’s guitar is soaring with Wheeler’s voice, playing a repetitive yet beautiful arpeggio that revolves around a ringing high note. The juxtaposition of this beautiful melody with the despondent, dismissive lyrical sentiments seems a bit odd, and yet it works, allowing Wheeler to leaven her own negative perspective with a more positive sound. None of this is intended to be taken all that seriously, she and Gavurin are saying. There’s something beautiful about our impermanence as humans. Even on our worst days, we can be relieved to know that soon enough, we will be gone.
After the chorus is over, Wheeler repeats the first few lines of the verse, including a line in which she wonders “whether the world will see I’m a better man than others by far.” I’ve struggled with the meaning of her reference to herself as a man, too, and I’ve come up empty. All I can really take from it is that it’s yet another subtle reminder not to take any of this too seriously. And once she’s sang that note, Gavurin fills in the rest of what would have been a repeat of the first verse with a solo that comes the closest he gets on this song to distortion. Scraping his slide against the strings of his guitar, he makes swooping, staccato noises inbetween gorgeous lead lines. The Sundays are not here to jar us, or shake us up. This is music for quiet contemplation, which in my life has often meant “music by which to sit around in a dark room contemplating suicide.” But don’t get me wrong, there’s hope here, even if it is only the hope that can be taken from a reminder not to worry so much about life. It’s as if The Sundays are saying, yeah, life sucks a lot of the time, but what the hell, right? It’s only life. Look on the bright side—we’re only flesh and blood, and before long the time will come that we’re gone from this world. And really, if nothing we can do will make all that much of a dent in the grand scheme of things, maybe we should stop stressing about the stupid little shit we do.
