Luka Lesson’s track Bones opens with the line, “there are 206 bones in our bodies, and mine are just like yours”, accompanied by a cello, groaning low and solemn.
In an age of factions and frictions, there is something soothing about remembering that underneath our clothes, hair and skin we have the same hardware. Our bones and blood are the same. We are wired the same.
The song’s video, premiering on Guardian Australia, opens with Lesson crouched on charcoal-black rocks overlooking the foamy waves of a turbulent ocean. It was shot in his hometown of Byron Bay near Broken Head and just below the Cape Byron Lighthouse – the most easterly point of Australia’s mainland.
Lesson, who has experienced depression, says the video came about after director Claudia Sangiorgi Dalimore asked him to describe the physical feeling of being in an emotional rut and how he manages to pull himself out of dark moments.
“I told her about spending time in the ocean, how I would talk shit and rap and speak poems on the beach at night where no-one could hear and how it was the beginning of me really letting go of so much stuff that I had been holding onto for a long time,” he says.
“Without sounding too cheesy, it felt as though the ocean would just take it all and not ask for anything in return.”
The song features Lesson on vocals with music by Jordan Thomas Mitchell and is dedicated to two friends of the poet who took their lives too soon.
If life has taught him anything, Lesson says, it is that the opposite of depression is not simply happiness but “a sense of defiance in the face of hopelessness, of strength in the face of despair, and faith even when everything seems impossible.”
- Bones features on Lesson’s album Antidote and is currently touring Australia
