Skinny Love

Recorded by Vernon alone in the cabin, it is track three on For Emma, Forever Ago, and the credits list no other player on it. It was the first single, released by 4AD and Jagjaguwar on 28 April 2008, and was given away as an iTunes UK single of the week. NPR's Stephen Thompson called it the album's best song, heard it as less a breakup letter than a suicide note, and singled out its steel-guitar hook.

Vernon has denied that it is simply about his former girlfriend Christy Smith. He has said it is about the stage of a relationship you stay in because you need help, and that the love is skinny because it has no weight: "Skinny love doesn't have a chance because it's not nourished." It has been heard on Grey's Anatomy and Chuck.

Live and covers

It is the band's most played song, logged 340 times on setlist.fm from a first performance in South Burlington, Vermont, on 30 November 2007. Vincent Moon filmed it for La Blogothèque in a Montmartre apartment in front of about twenty people in 2008, and that December the band played it on Letterman with three drummers. Birdy's version, her debut single in 2011, reached 17 in the UK and one in the Netherlands and went eleven times platinum in Australia. Japanese Breakfast recorded it for Spotify Singles in 2022. The upload in the hypersongs web is the album version.