Story Song Structure (6): If I Had A Boat

I told you about star-crossed lovers, tragic and regretted. I told you about hellbound losers and ex-pats with plans easy to let go of. This one's for the dreamers.

There are (almost) no tricks to Lyle Lovett's If I Had A Boat (link here). There's no need for them.
Oh, but he's got a smile for us. Tonto telling Kemosabe to take a hike...

The frame here is by now a standard one. Here, Lyle gives us a static frame with the chorus, and the story's verses are whole, but vignettes, three little stories all connected to the frame, leading back to the dreamer's sea.

I said there were almost no tricks. That's not quite true. At the end of the original recording, Lyle repeats the last line.

I wonder about that. Note, I don't say this detracts from the song or anything. However, what I question is whether this was the way Lyle first wrote it. Now, this is a standard way to exit a song, it's a classic way to let the listener know "I'm done now" in shorthand.

Here, what I'd love to know is whether Lyle, or a producer or somebody else, listened to a first pass and said "it just sort of finishes, maybe we should add something, end it a little more definitively?" It has that feel, given how precisely the whole thing works together, in terms of symmetry of the chorus. Hmm.