Breakup Song Watch Sunday: Picture, by Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow

This song is so confusing.  The singing seems so sincere and heartfelt, but if you listen to the lyrics, the narrative just doesn’t stick together.

So it starts out simple enough.  Kid Rock has holed up in a hotel for three-day bender of booze and coke and women.  As you can imagine, he’s heartbroken to find himself at the bottom of this particular barrel.  So he’s put Sheryl’s picture away, because it seemed tacky to leave it out while doing body shots off tonight’s floozy.  It’s kind of odd that he went to the trouble to take Sheryl’s picture with him to his No-Tell Motel in the first place, but whatever.

Then Sheryl tells her side of the experience:  everyone in town knows something is up but they won’t tell her what, and there’s been total radio silence from Kid for three damn nights.

So far, so good.

But then Sheryl says she had to put Kid’s picture away, too!  Because she can’t look at Kid while she’s lying next to some other guy.  !?!?  So, wait, now Sheryl is doing body shots, too? 

No, I know!  Sheryl is married to someone else, and she and Kid had an affair.  Tired of being the Other Man, Kid broke it off and is now drowning his sorrows.  Yeah, that makes sense.

No, that doesn’t work.  A wife wouldn’t have a picture of her lover out in the first place.

What the hell?

Fast forward to some indeterminate time in the future.  Kid and Sheryl are clearly broken up.  The nostalgia when they run into each other is so thick you could cut it with the razor Kid uses on his cocaine.  Sheryl hopes Kid is coming home to stay.  So that means he wasn’t the Other Man, but the Man.  So what was she doing lying next to someone else?  Or is that someone else only someone she hooked up with after a “decent interval”?  But if so, how can she be encouraging Kid to come back home?  Is she just going to lead Kid back home, and announce to his successor that his services are no longer needed?

What in the world is going on here?

And she swears she’s changed her ways.  What ways?  That means she was doing body shots off some strange guy, after all!  But, she’s a church-going gal.  This makes no sense at all!

And now, as if we weren’t all confused enough, here is a video of the song, set in a medieval game world.  With a penguin!