Songfacts®:

• Wainwright explained to Billboard magazine why he decided to adapt three Shakespeare sonnets to go along with nine original songs on All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu. Said the American-Canadian singer-songwriter: " I originally approached the sonnets because I worked with Robert Wilson at the Berliner Ensemble on a sonnet play, which is still running as part of their repertoire. I wrote 10 pieces for that play, and there were three that I really enjoyed playing myself. But the whole album is a complete work, and when I play it live I'm going to play it as a song cycle, with no pauses in between any of the songs."
• Sonnet 20 was published in a collection of 154 sonnets in the early seventeenth century. It is one of the "fair youth" group of sonnets, in which most scholars agree that the narrator to be addressing a young man. This interpretation contributes to assumptions concerning the homosexuality of Shakespeare, or at least the speaker of his sonnet.