While lyrical-slow songs play a central role in the market of popular music in Taiwan, their verse-chorus form is still poorly understood. The present study analyzed lyrical-slow songs in Taiwan, with the focus on the meanings of the lyrics and the musical features. By clarifying the relationships between the verse and the chorus, we investigated how the verse-chorus form evoked emotionsin listeners. Analysis on lyrics revealed that the majority of lyricalslow songs were of these three patterns: the decision pattern, the outer-inner pattern, and the intertemporal pattern. The experiment on listening behavior employed physiological measures to estimate the temporal dynamics of listeners’ emotion. We found that changes in loudness, texture, rhythm, melody, tempo, and harmony at the entrance of the chorus highlighted the verse-to-chorus transition, and listeners showed skin conductance responses at such transitions. Results are discussed within the contexts of schema shifts and reward learning, whereby we expect to provide insights into the popularity of the verse-chorus form over recent decades.