Songfacts®:

• "Skeletons" is a track from Rickie Lee Jones' 1981 sophomore album, Pirates. It tells the tragic story of a Black man shot dead by police while driving his pregnant partner to the hospital. In the final verse, the timeline shifts into the future to picture the child growing up without a father, left with only the "skeletons" of a life that could have been.
• But what do birds leave behind, of the wings that they came with
  If a son's in a tree building model planes?
  Skeletons
  
  The victim in the song is "Bird," a recurring character across Pirates. He first appears in the opening track, "We Belong Together," before his story meets its fatal end in "Skeletons." Jones turns his nickname into a devastating final image: birds have light, hollow skeletons beneath their wings to fly, while Bird's son is left assembling model airplanes without a father. The bones represent both the physical remains of a life and the shattered pieces of a family.
• The story was inspired by a wave of "accidental" LAPD killings of Black people in late-1970s Los Angeles. "The police were just crazy, crazy cowboys," Jones told The Line of Best Fit. "They killed a lot more Black people than white people."
• The song also tapped into Jones' personal dread of sudden loss. As a young girl, she experienced the aftermath of a catastrophic motorcycle accident involving her brother Daniel, which left him with permanent brain damage and the loss of a leg.
  
  "My brother's accident figured heavily into that vigilance I have, what's going to happen today?" she explained to Mojo magazine. "So that was there, but the tragedy of it was made from those feelings of breaking up with the future."
• Jones wrote "Skeletons" right after her breakup with Tom Waits. The couple met at Los Angeles' legendary Troubadour club in 1977 and dated for roughly two years. As Jones detailed in her 2021 memoir Last Chance Texaco, the relationship fractured after she opened up to Waits about her heroin addiction. He pulled away and drove off the next morning. Following an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile that afternoon, Jones went home and wrote "Skeletons."
  
  Jones wrote the song on her and Waits' "sad old piano." "It somehow must have reflected a feeling I had that at any moment your life can simply be taken away from you," she told Mojo. "Not that you'll be the one killed, but you'll be the one left with the baby. You'll be the one left."
• Jones wrote "Skeletons" solo and producers Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman tracked it at Warner Bros. Recording Studios in North Hollywood. It is one of two songs on Pirates recorded live with a full orchestra, cut during a single session on January 30, 1980.
• The song's stark, stripped-back arrangement balances out the denser, jazz-inflected instrumentation heard elsewhere on Pirates. The album peaked at #5 on the Billboard 200, earned RIAA Gold certification, and drew glowing praise from Rolling Stone, which compared the record to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark.
• While critics often tag Pirates as a breakup record, Jones resists that simple label. Several tracks were written later at her mother's home in Olympia, Washington, and "Traces of the Western Slopes" was co-written with her next partner, Sal Bernardi. Yet "Skeletons" captures the exact moment a future vanishes instantly, a feeling she associated with her brother's accident as much as her split from Waits.
• In 2023, Jones named "Skeletons" among her five personal favorite compositions. Growing emotional as she discussed it, she admitted to The Line of Best Fit, "This song still kills me."
  
  Jones said she rarely performed it live during her commercial peak, partly because it was so painful to revisit, and partly because she felt uncomfortable using the real-world horror of racial violence for artistic performance.