I was recently listening to Skeleton Tree and realised all these years I’d misheard one of your lyrics. I always heard…’but the echo comes back EMPTY.’ This line always struck a chord in my heart. I’d recently lost my wife to cancer, left to cope with two beautiful young children and I often imagined calling across the water to her but the echo coming back empty. I’d never dare suggest that my lyric is better, but would you agree that it might be almost as good as yours?

Dear Russell,

A dark cloud hangs over the album Skeleton Tree. I have always felt it to be a record that possessed a shocking, premonitory energy, like a curse. We began recording the album just before Arthur died and completed it shortly after, and I haven’t listened to the record properly since – I prefer not to go back there.  I remember it as such a raw, unadorned and desolate thing. Songs like ‘Jesus Alone’, ‘Magneto’, ‘Anthrocene’, and ‘Girl in Amber’ felt like they possessed a malevolent force at their core, foreshadowing the devastation that would visit my home. The song ‘Skeleton Tree’ itself was added later. It was the first song I wrote after Arthur’s death, so it was with some trepidation that I listened to it to check on your supposed mishearing of the lyrics.

I played the song and was genuinely surprised by how lovely it was – a gorgeous, lilting piano line and a beautiful vocal melody resting on a strange, mismatched chord structure. It is full of demonic imagery, yet also beautiful – A jittery TV glowing white like fire. The title, ‘Skeleton Tree’, was a bleak crucifixion image, the tree upon which no one is redeemed. It is a desperate song, filled with desperate images from a desperate time, yet touched with feelings of hope that I could not begin to see back then. As I listened, I thought of you, Russell, new to grief, navigating a life without your partner, a life you did not anticipate or choose – a father dying daily in sacrificial love for his beautiful children. Your reading of the lyric was correct.

I call out, I call out
Right across the sea
But the echo comes back empty
Nothing is for free

Ultimately, I found the echo I had thought to be empty was not empty at all, it was simply drowned in the roar of grief. As the grief retreated, I came to understand that the presence of the departed resonated through those left behind. Your children, Russell, carry their mother in their bones, in their souls and in their cells, the maternal bond never truly severed.

When I wrote ‘Skeleton Tree’, I could not perceive any hope in the song at all. It was a vacuum, all nihilism and void. Listening to it now, years later, I can hear its insistent beauty loud and clear. The echo is not empty, Russell, not in the slightest – we call out, and given time, the echo comes back bearing the entirety of the world.

Love, Nick

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