Rob,

This is quite polished and the lead vox – although a touch cloying at times – is nice and clean and pleasant enough.

John has gone into great length on the mix (he has the ears for that sort of thing!) so I’m addressing my comments chiefly to the composition itself.

The structure is ok – slightly bereft of surprises, with rather too much similarity between the chorus and verse progressions for my taste.

I do think that the harmonies are overdone. I would suggest that just one backing voice – if the right one, of course - would be more poignant in most places.

The intro exposes what I always feel to be the major flaw with these audio loop based programmes. They play what they want, and not necessarily what the composer intended.
The root note of that acoustic gtr intro is jumping around all over the place.

Contrast this to the line followed by the ‘cello (which is actually being played) at 1:30. C up to E up to F up to G (or whatever key this is in), thereby reinforcing the chord structure.

There is something not quite right about the drum entry at 1:01, but I can’t put my finger on what it is. Perhaps it should come in with some sort of break rather than just 'playing straight'.

I think you could have gone with 2 verses here before the chorus.

My main difficulty – and it is quite a major one – is that in the key section of the song, i.e. lines 1 and 2 of the chorus, the lyric and the melody simply don’t fit.

The stress on ‘memories’ falls, of course, on the first sylable.
You wouldn’t ask “what are your earliest memoRIES?”
I know some other forum members do not see this as a problem, but I find that this grates terribly (even when established artists do it, which they do often).

Contrast this to using the following more-or-less nonsense lyric which I offer simply to illustrate the point (for those first lines of the chorus)
In my heart, you’ll remain
In my heart, there’s a stain..

The section from 2:45 – 3:17 feels to me like it is going nowhere. It’s not different enough from the rest of the piece to qualify as a bridge – musically it’s just padding, although I do concede that it is here that the lyric is propelled forwards “please remember that I love you still”

oh and the intro click can go now!

For all this, this piece has a nice Emmylou feel to it and I enjoyed listening to it.

very best regards,

Marc

Marc's SoundCloud
Marc's YouTube