Well, I don't know how I'd feel about it in someone else's hands, but Emil is unreal. That's a poem, and it shouldn't be a song. But there it is. He'd taken a poem, and I don't know how he ever set the lines of it. He added the music, and the music told a lot of the story.
Lyrics are more distilled than poetry.
They don't have 100 percent of the job to do. Or some will say the lyrics are very melancholy when in fact it's the music that's creating that. Emil is doing some kind of heart surgery with his melodies. And of course Mary's voice. Some of the songs, if they were sung by other people, I don't know if they would have the same kind of impact.