Smothered in Hugs

The sixth track on Bee Thousand is credited to Mitch Mitchell, Jim Pollard and Robert Pollard. On the album Pollard sings and plays guitar, with Mitchell on guitar, Dan Toohey on bass and Kevin Fennell on drums. An earlier take sat on the abandoned 1993 sequences of the album, including Instructions to the Rusty Time Machine, and a four-track version came out on Suitcase 3 in 2009.

The lyric runs from a summer arrival to a winter departure, with judges, saints and a textbook committee deciding the subject should be left out. Seth Troyer of PopMatters heard it boom in with grunge distortion before a vocal that sounds shouted from another room.

Live and covers

First played at CBGB on the same July 1993 night as Tractor Rape Chain, it has been performed around three hundred times, most often in 2016, and was in the encore of the farewell show at the Metro on New Year's Eve 2004. The Flaming Lips recorded what Cover Me called a dreamy, meandering version for the 2011 tribute Sing for Your Meat. Car Seat Headrest played it at SXSW in 2016, and Sparklehorse and Jeff Tweedy have played it live. The upload in the hypersongs web is the album version.