& roll." The song's lyrics are entirely free-form in that they do not follow any consistent rhythmic meter and read almost like prose. Rhyming only appears occasionally and irregularly, sometimes as internal rhymes within a line ("On the Peking ferry I was feeling merry", "Shanghai Lil never used the pill"). There are somewhat more near-rhymes between lines (inferior/mirror, ways/same, stampede/tea, funk/luck, attraction/sanction), but these too are unpredictable and occasional. The lyrics even exhibit occasional elements of subtle vowel alliteration ("I firmly believed that I didn't need anyone but me"). Stewart's confident performance, however, renders these shortcomings of rhyme and rhythm unnoticeable to the listener; the song sounds like it does have lyrical rhyme and rhythm. Analysis and reception In the Rolling Stone Album Guide, critic Paul Evans described "Every Picture Tells a Story" and "Maggie May," another song off the Every Picture Tells a Story album, as Rod Stewart's and Ron Wood's "finest hour—happy lads wearing their hearts on their sleeves." Music critic Greil Marcus regards the song as "Rod Stewart's greatest performance." Allmusic critic Denise Sullivan commented that some of the lyrics are racist and sexist (e.g., describing an Asian woman as a "slit-eyed lady"), and that the song "is a real nugget from a brief period in time when rock singers didn't worry about what it meant to be rude -- in fact, the ruder and cruder, the better." However, a live version of the song performed by Stewart in 1992, 21 years after the original album version was released, skips a complete verse containing some particularly unkind and crude references to women, as well as a self-deprecating reference: "I firmly believed that I/Didn't need anyone but me/I sincerely felt I was so complete/Look how wrong you can be/The women I've known I wouldn't let tie my shoe/They wouldn't give you the time of day/But the slit-eyed lady knocked me off my feet/God I was so glad I found her". Allmusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine praised the song as "devilishly witty." The lyrics begin with a reference to the theme of self-discovery: Spent some time feeling inferior Standing in front of my mirror Combed my hair in a thousand ways But I came out looking just the same In other media "Every Picture Tells a Story" was used in the Cameron Crowe movie Almost Famous in a scene where main characters William and Penny walk through the halls