Hi Gordon. Congrats on the critique from Ms. Shock.

I'd agree with what folks have said about meter and rhyme scheme and structure. I have a hard time trying to fit this to a melody, and I tend on first draft to crowd enough words into a lyric to elbow all those angels off the head of a pin.

There's a lot of imagery here. You do a good job of following the old writer's rule of showing instead of telling. And I really like some of the lines: "It seems there's something I used to say," for example. To me, that says more about the mindset of someone in a broken relationship that all the musings about how much fun it used to be to go skinny dipping behind the school house.

But honestly, the whole song seems like a set up to the "punch line" of her dying just as he finally decides after God knows how many years or decades of silence on the subject to finally talk about why things aren't the way they used to be. It feels like a rip off at that point.

The narrative arc, the change in the people, is that once they were in love and now they aren't. I want to know why, or have some indication of why, it happened. Otherwise it's like coming across the aftermath of a train wreck and when you ask a witness what happened, all you get is a shrug of the shoulders and an "I dunno."

There's a certain subset of country song that uses a hook that changes meaning as the time of the story passes. "If You Get There Before I Do" comes to mind. You might be able to do that with faded blue. The winter sky is a faded blue. The jeans are a faded blue, etc., right up to the blue lips. But I'd make it a wistful remembrance and maybe even add the hope of hooking up in heaven.