I recently started reading a book about George Gershwin, so I went back to listen to what Gershwin music I have. I'd skipped over it about a month ago with the aim of returning to it while reading this book, like I did with Bach earlier this year.
Yester-day, I listened to the third disc of a ten-CD set of Gershwin music. The disc is subtitled Gershwin on Screen I: "Girl Crazy" & "Rhapsody in Blue." The first track is "You've Got What Gets Me," performed by Eddie Quillan, Dixie Lee, Mitzi Green and the RKO Studio Orchestra. I didn't notice this at first, but the lyrics are really clever, specifically the lines "You've got what gets me / What gets me you've got." What's great about them is that they could be taken in two different ways. It could indicate physical attractiveness ("You have looks that attract me"), or it could be an expression of a deeper connection ("You have the mental capacity/empathy to understand how I feel, what I think, &c"). Of course, it could also be both.
I've always liked Ira Gershwin's lyrics because of the rhymes and phrases he uses, but finding this has got me thinking about them in different ways.
