Songfacts®:

• You don't see this very often: a clever singer/songwriter making inroads on the independent circuit, gaining a small degree of national attention, who later becomes a Pop-Country superstar. With the Jennifer Nettles Band, the future Sugarland starlet released 3 independent albums and went on the Lilith Fair in 1999. The band drew praises from a number of music publications including Performing Songwriter magazine, and accumulated a substantial fan base along the East Coast.
  
  Nettles formed Sugarland in 2003 and when they hit it big, her Jennifer Nettles Band pretty much vanished. When we asked her about this in our 2010 interview, Nettles explained: "It's definitely a different time in my life, and I feel so different and distant from that. And I really use my writing to be the snapshot of where I am, not only emotionally but also artistically. Consequently, what I'm drawn to are the things that are more current and more present, because those are the things that I'm either working out in myself, or those are the places that I am artistically currently that inspire me the most.
  
  That's not to say that when I go back and think about these songs that I'm not inspired. And especially with 'The Story of Your Bones,' that's something that I think could still resonate in me and translate to audiences in a certain way. But as I evolve as an artist and a writer, I get more interested in what I'm doing currently."
• Speaking about "Story of Your Bones," Nettles told us: "That's a beautiful song. That song was written to my boyfriend at the time, and we had been apart for a very long time, just from distancing with the jobs and geography and where we lived. And it was also working out some of my family issues. There's a part in there where I talk about my face, and what I got from whom in my genetic history, and then consequently what I didn't get from whom, or who I didn't know in a certain way. So I was also working out my family stuff in that song. But my favorite part in that song is where it says, 'Like berries, you color my hands, like wine you stain my lips.' I love that line. That's my favorite line in that song. I love that whole section of that line, 'I have to know the story of your bones, and I long to know the map of your skin.' Awww… I love that. That was inspired. That was young love, man! I love it."
• When Nettles sings, "I got my nose from another man, someone who didn't bother," she's referring to her absentee father. She was raised by a stepfather.