Hot take: most bridges are super-satisfying because most songwriting is so abysmally poor in quality that listeners are bored by most verses and choruses. https://twitter.com/infinitetask/status/1388143815156981763">https://twitter.com/infinitet...

I just sang “the City of New Orleans” to the kids to put them to bed, though about @InfiniteTask’s tweet, and realized that Steve Goodman didn’t give it a bridge: the reason is because the lyrics plus the melodic structure of chorus-verse are strong enough in-themselves!!

See also: the oeuvre of Bob Dylan. (Heck, more than half his songs are *strophic* [just a repeating chorus, with only minimal or no melodic changes]; writing powerful strophic songs requires being a confident enough songwriter to pull it off!)

My other hot take on this point is that there is not a single song that ends in a fade out that wouldn’t be better with a proper coda, but songwriters were either too lazy or under too much pressure to fit into radio time that they didn’t discipline themselves to make it work. https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="😔" title="Nachdenkliches Gesicht" aria-label="Emoji: Nachdenkliches Gesicht">

“Sister Golden Hair” is one such example of a song utterly ruined by a lame ending. I would listen to “Sister Golden Hair” forever if it would just end, so I could put it on repeat!!