songs with verses that are much shorter than the chorus

I listened to the Raspberries and was struck by how comically short the verses are in "Go All the Way" (4 bar verse followed by 16 bars of chorus) and "I Wanna Be With You" (6 bar verse : 16 bar chorus). What are some other examples of this?

Mina’s « Se Telefonando » !

^ That's a good example. It's 35 seconds of verse and then two full minutes of chorus and then the song ends.

"The Name of the Game" by ABBA, though you could have some debate about what is chorus and what is bridge. This discrepancy is magnified in the single version, where the verse is only played once!

Speaking of ABBA, the choruses of Waterloo are about twice as long as the verses (the "history book on the shelf" part I think of as a bridge).

"Walk On By" has a chorus about 4 times as long as the verse, depending again on what you count as verse/bridge/chorus.

Walk Away Renee?

Maybe not going strictly by bar counts, but the verses feel very brief, as if they're wasting no time getting to the chorus' waves of yearning.

Tell Me by Autre Ne Veut is a six second intro, 16 seconds of verse, then 32 seconds of chorus. It goes directly into second verse, which is twice as long as the first, but then the rest of the song is more chorus. The bridge is the chorus acapella, then there's more chorus. Genius song.

the verses feel very brief

Partly because the four melodic phrases that comprise it really fit together like one musical gesture.

"The Name of the Game" by ABBA, though you could have some debate about what is chorus and what is bridge. This discrepancy is magnified in the single version, where the verse is only played once!"

ABBA had a clever thing whereby some of their most memorable songs had two choruses, one after the other - "SOS" is the classic example. If you count "the love you gave me etc" as Chorus One and "when you're gone" as Chorus Two they're technically the same number of lines as the verse, but they take up more space. "Dancing Queen" is similar. "Take a Chance on Me" has tiny little perfunctory verses and a huge chorus.

The chorus of New Order's "Crystal" is double-length if you count the twangy bass guitar break that follows it as part of the chorus.

The odd thing is that I remember a similar thread on RateYourMusic. But searching the site, and using Google to search it, reveals nothing. Perhaps they erased all the older threads, or stopped Google from scraping it. Hmm.

The other example that springs to mind is "Life is a Flower" by Ace of Bass, where the verse is a little stub of a thing that - cleverly or irritatingly, depending on your taste - goes into the chorus one line before you'd expect.

"We found love in a hopeless place"