"Through an arranger they had met on the road, Vic Schoen, they landed one show, for one night only at the Edison Hotel with The Billy Swanson Orchestra, where they sang exactly one verse of one song, " the bio said.

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One hauntingly dusky verse later, he goes one step further, unveiling a ghostly series of "oohs, " each as infectious as it is portentous.

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Medunjanin asked for more time to finish one verse, then shifted into a critique of American foreign policy.

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"One mistake change lives all in one night, " he raps in one verse.

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Certain portions Simon read alone, others he'd subcontract to another family member, or we'd go around the table, each person reading one verse.

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The Duke sings "Possente amor (A great love)" while swilling Scotch from a bottle (one verse only) and "La donna e mobile (Women are fickle)" while swinging around the stripper pole.

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When the girl group All Saints covered it in 1998, reaching number one in the UK, they also left out the last verse.

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One is its witty, teasing style (the epilogue is in verse).

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The key may lie in the phrase "unslakeable thirsting in the backyard" in the last verse. (Yes, "unslakeable, " as in "insatiable, " one example of Veirs' idiosyncratic use of language.) She's not crass enough to spell it out so explicitly, but she's equating emotional longing with heat-wave dehydration, in a wonderfully subtle way.

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