Herb - (re: your suggestions)

I appreciate the sentiment and I get that you are offering what you believe to be valid suggestions. But, quite frankly, I think they are all "misguided". On every point. The lines that you are suggesting be dropped are some of the most powerful lines in the song.

I gave away your cds and your yoga mat
after all what would i do with something like that

A yoga mat is a very personal thing. More personal than anything up to that point. And the statement "what would I do with it" means that the guy has no connection to that part of the woman that was supposed to mean so much to him.
Women take their yoga seriously - it means something to them. If you want to "sell" to that audience, you need to be able to tap into those type of connections. To suggest that those lines don't add anything is missing some big stuff.

i deleted every picture that i could find
of you or you and me or anything that brought you to mind

This one is even bigger. I drank your wine, I unraveled your crochet, I took your message off my phone. Little details. I deleted EVERY PICTURE of YOU or YOU AND ME or ANYTHING THAT BROUGHT YOU TO MIND. That's "I've rid myself of it ALL". To think that that doesn't add anything is, again, missing something huge. If you are leaving stuff like that out then you're cutting the wrong stuff.

The intent is not to "get to the chorus as quickly as possible" at the expense of the details that lead to it.
Good writing is about the details. Start cutting the good stuff just so you can get to the chorus and what have you got? A formula for vapid.

I don't feel there is a let-down at all. In fact it continues to build. Perhaps you stopped listening because of some preconceived notion of a "pre-chorus". No idea when THAT term started popping up - because no one I ever wrote with EVER talked about something called a pre-chorus. Nor any publisher I ever sat down with. "Verse" seems a good enough term. Then a chorus. An occassional bridge.

The ending is what it should be musically - no ending. It's a song about something that is never going to go away. It doesn't get "buttoned up". It goes on... and on... To "neatly tie this up" at the end would just be - wrong.
And to think that every song has to have the same 2 bar ending is limited thinking.

Ah.. and the tattoo... WHO gets a tattoo that says "I love you"? No one.
Tattoos say "I love Betty". "I Love Charlene". "I Love Tammy".
It's not personal - I have never known anyone named Tammy. If you constantly go for "generic" in everything you write, you'll end up with... well... generic meaningless songs. Sanitized to the point of being completely uninteresting. All potatoes - no meat. You need some sharp edges.

Songwriting "rules" or guidelines are a good place to start. But if you use them in a way that leaves you with
a song void of interesting content, then you're headed in the wrong direction...

Thanks for the input.

floyd

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