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

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.

“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!!