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Blunt as his Charles is, he proves to be the most guarded of the trio; there are unsung stanzas of sadness in his eyes.

“The word stops, the heart dies / The wind counts the lost goodbyes,” goes one characteristically haunting stanza.

They spoke on a recent day in their Berlin studio as they giggled and tripped over their own stanzas — which exploit a feature of German grammar that crams nouns together into strings of syllables.

He reads from a stack of loose papers, his hands moving in time with the stanzas he spits like rap bars.

“Obviously, the second half, definitely missed more shots,” said Wells, whose team made 2 of 11 from deep in the second stanza.