Skin & Bones

Poetry. Music. SKIN & BONES is a collection of lyrics by songwriter/artist Jeff Mellin. Named for a lyric from his album Jeff Mellin Saves the World (Stereorrific, 1999), the book covers songs from Mellin's bare-bones coffeehouse days to his later power-pop material. "While it's often difficult to gauge the worth of pop lyrics printed on the page without musical accompaniment, it's remarkable how well SKIN & BONES reads, as lyrics in the poetic sense," writes Garrett Caples in his intro. "Jeff's lyrics considered as poetry at their best evoke the only-just stylistically-belated, yet entirely individual and intense poems of Weldon Kees; even at their least effective, they have the readable lightness of Edward Arlington Robinson, and everyone knows Paul Simon made 'Richard Corey' a better song than it ever was a poem, which illustrates my point nicely." With photographs by rock photographer John Soares.