stage again and Buffett comes back out on stage by himself for a second encore and performs an acoustic ballad to end the show. This final song is usually what his hardcore fans look forward to the most because it's a different song every show and usually an obscure selection; many fans consider Buffett's ballads to be his best songs despite not being among his famous songs. A collection of Buffett's second encores, entitled encores, was released in 2010. Morphine frontman Mark Sandman sometimes mocked the practice. At the close of Morphine shows, he would wave and say "Thank you! Good night!", but the band would remain in their places, and the lights would not be dimmed. After several minutes, the band would begin playing again. Boston played multiple shows with four encores throughout the 1980s. Both The Cure and Prince have been known to play a large number of songs in their encores, either in a long singular encore or spanning across multiple encores. The encore portions of their sets have sometimes lasted longer than the initial shows themselves. The Cure have played up to five encores on a handful of occasions and Prince has played up to seven. Etymology The word encore comes from the French encore , which means ‘again, some more’; however, it is not used this way in French, but it is ancora in Italian. French speakers commonly use instead either une autre (‘another’), un rappel (‘a return, curtain call’) or the Latin bis (‘second time’) in the same circumstances. Italians use bis too. In England, [un']altra volta (Italian for ‘another time’) was used in the early nineteenth century, but such usage had been completely supplanted by 1900. References Concerts