Skin & Bones: Song Lyrics

Skin & Bones is the first-ever collection of lyrics by songwriter / artist Jeff Mellin. Named for a lyric from his "tour de force" album Jeff Mellin Saves the World (Stereorrific, 1999), the book covers songs from Mellin's bare-bones coffeehouse days to his later, more fleshed-out 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 and Bones reads, as lyrics in the poetic sense," says critic and poet Garrett Caples. "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." Also features photographs by the award-winning photographer John Soares.