"and I passed a cow and the cow was brown" - Waiter! There's a fly in my soup.

I've been listening a lot to Nick Cave's 'No More Shall We Part' recently. 'Hallelujah' is beautiful but "and I passed a cow and the cow was brown"? I dunno, maybe it ties in with the writer's block of "My typewriter had turned as mute as a tomb", or maybe he's having a little chuckle to himself, but it seems odd to do this after investing a song with such feeling. Whatever, I can't ever remember hearing a line that seemed so out of place, it lodged in my head for an entire day last week. Help!