"my hat     is bent oh, i got a bent hat maybe i'll slow down and straighten it out" continued from the previous verse, when things aren't as they should be, the solution is to slow down, stop rushing-- that's what will right the wrongs.
in this particular song, "slow down" is a purely musical phrase. the lyrical content is actually not what i wanted to say at the time. and i tried very hard to come up with something else besides 'slow down'. but 'slow down' was the first and only good thing i could find that sounded right. to put it in context, 'slow down' was the first actual lyric i got, and the only other thing i knew was i wanted it to be a blues sequence (the chords going how they go, in those verse sections), with the 'title' being at that location (where 'slow down' is). and the first and only thing i could come up with was 'slow down', sung in that way. that's just the only thing that seemed to fit. i tried to come up with something else because it didn't 'seem' like the most interesting concept i could come up with. but i couldn't find anything else that worked as well. so i had to write the whole song around that