All through the evening's rehearsal it would happen again and again — after all these brief snatches, these truncated phrases, the chorus would sing a whole passage, their voices swirling around each other, the pieces turning into a whole, and there it was, a Carnegie moment on a cold night in New Jersey.
And, like many great songs, the last phrase of the chorus contains a poetic feint: "You had my heart inside your hands and you played it to the beat".
The old song "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" is used as a template for a new version about an astronaut, implicitly underlining the concept of space as a "wild frontier" (a phrase from the chorus of the original).
Leonard and Madonna had added Spanish phrases in the chorus, over the trumpets of the second verse, and also in the added instrumental break in the middle.
The song epitomizes Madonna's interest with Hispanic culture that continued after the release of "La Isla Bonita", by adding Spanish phrases in the chorus and over the trumpets of the second verse, and also by the added instrumental break in the middle.
Bomba begins with a solo voice singing a phrase to which the chorus, supported by the musicians, responds (in a pattern known as call and response).
The musicians inhabited the music so fully that the performance took on a quality of appealing looseness: performers stood or sat, depending on the requirements of a given phrase; members of the chorus emerged as soloists, doubled as bell ringers, blended back into the ensemble.
Ms. Wilson brought sultry languor to "I Want to Be Loved," a Willie Dixon song that Muddy Waters memorably recorded; each time the title phrase appeared in the chorus, the band stopped, and Ms. Wilson drawled it out, making a two-bar break feel like an excursion.
And he even appropriates the phrase "bling bling" for the chorus of a sensitive soft-rock song.
One song played recently at a rally for Mr. Maduro was based on the hit "Gangnam Style," with the words "with Maduro" substituted for the phrase "sexy lady" in the chorus.
