Disc 1 Track 6

And then, after the escalating heaviness of “Wave That Flag” and “Kerosene,” the Bottle Rockets get silly. Really silly. Silly enough to make “Gas Girl” sound like a sober meditation on human frailty.

“Every Kinda Everything” opens with a ridiculous extended metaphor about cars:

Well I know we’re different and this might sound heavy
But I’m thinking that I’m a Ford and baby you’re a Chevy
That’s ok, I can appreciate any good car

Can’t you tell by the way I’ve been bumping your bumper
That I’m following close, trying to be your lover
Ain’t gonna hurt ya, honey that’s what a bumper’s for

And somehow gets more ridiculous from there, going from mixing metaphors to crazily piling contrasting non sequiturs on top of each other with hilarious abandon. Mixing metaphors once sounds like clumsy writing; attacking the very concept of metaphorical unity this determinedly turns into a deliberate and awesome rhetorical maneuver of its own. Adding to the fun, most of the piled-up metaphors sit juuuust within the bounds of “looks innocent but probably filthy.” Consider:

Well you might not like it, but baby let me tell ya
You’re my favorite flower and I love to smell ya
You’re pretty as a starfish sticking to the ocean floor

I don’t know, maybe it’s innocent and I’m the filthy one, but a verse or two previously, he’s threatening the inamorata with sticky white stuff that she’ll never get off of her hands, and a few lines later he’s talking about how “fat” on her he is.

All of this silliness (with a chorus that ends with repeated assertions that “I ain’t even joking at all”) gets delivered in a wider sonic context that sounds like 90s mainstream country from a different, better universe (“Whenever you’re ready/ honey we can go steady” is an extremely 90s mainstream country chorus) . It’s spacious and boom-chicky, with looping guitar work and big group vocals on the chorus including another barely-there Jeff Tweedy cameo.

It all adds up to a fun but inessential song, which I don’t mean in any way as a putdown. The album was getting strangely heavy; a blast of state fair cotton candy was just what the doctor ordered.