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What are some of your personal misheard lyrics?
I’m sure most people know of the common examples (“Hold me closer, Tony Danza”), but I’m interested in lyrics that you or someone you know has gotten wrong in the songs you regularly listen to.
Also, I’m interested in the story of how you found out it was a misheard lyric.
- How long had you heard the wrong thing?
- How did you find out the what the actual line was supposed to be?
- Was there a dawning realization or comedy wrapped up in it?
- Do you still sing it your way in spite of the actual lyrics?
- Is the song actually improved by your lyric swap?
If it’s not a burden, link to the timestamp of the song(s) where your misheard lyrics occurs.
If you want to prime people to hear things your way, feel free to put the actual lyrics in a <details> dropdown to hide them, so people can listen to the song with your words in mind first.
~ Hotel California by The Eagles
Circa 2000 internet search was not what it is now. Having pirated the song from the college dorm network, we didn't even have official lyrics. So we turned to the dictionary, which only gave us:
The warm smell of colitis sounds like the road trip from hell, but it makes me laugh every time the song comes on.
For those who want proper resolution to this saga, colitas is Spanish for "little tip" or "little bud" and is a reference to marijuana.
A friend of mine used to corrupt Creedence Clearwater's "there's a bad moon on the rise" with "there's a bathroom on the right", and now I can't unhear that. It ruined the song for me.
Looks at username.
Yeah, that checks out.
Even the alt covers of this song, I still hear this instead of star-crossed.
Star-crossed is also a misheard lyric! The actual line is "got a long list of ex-lovers"
Well that makes way more sense with "they'll tell you I'm insane"
Incidentally, the first time I heard the song, I always heard it as "long list of ex-lovers" and didn't think anything of it.
Then I hear a bunch of people mishearing it and then I started to mishear it.
Beck - Loser
Only this year has my wife made me realize the actual lyrics say “Soy un perdedor” when she happened to sing that line in the car as I was driving. I remember watching the music video on MTV in the 90s. Can’t believe how many years it’s been of me not realizing I misheard those lyrics!
I’m so torn now… I don’t listen to it very often, I don’t listen to Beck in general. Will I still sing it the wrong way? Maybe. I think I’m in the phase where I won’t sing it at all and will keep listening attentively when that line comes up almost as though I still don’t fully believe I was wrong.
Welp, today I learned
I learned the correct lyrics from Weird Al. It's all thanks to his superior pronunciation in The Alternative Polka. 😂
Edit: added the youtube link
I’ve heard this before, but clearly not enough times or simply didn’t pay enough attention. You’re right! It’s right there!
Sort of on the same note, the songs from the movie K-Pop Demon Hunters have a lot of Korean mixed in so I’m not sure if I’m failing to catch the English or it’s in fact Korean (which I don’t speak at all). I looked them up to avoid another loser situation haha
Until I looked up the lyrics I thought you meant it was “Soy un perdedor” instead of "so why don’t you kill me." That would have been a real brainfuck.
I got a weird one, I watched the Japanese Godzilla movies as a kid and also listened to Smash Mouth on the radio, so I remembered:
only shooting stars break the mold
as:
only shooting stars wake up Mothra.
Hey now, you're a monster
Smash the city, go nuts
Hey now, you're a kaiju
It's time for carnage, and thus
(It's all just flora and fauna)
Only shooting stars wake up Mothra
There we go. Took about 5-10 min while I was waiting on Starbucks lol.
Ha, thank you for this!
This is vastly superior to the real lyrics. 🐍🐍
My favorite is instead of "Sad But True" I thought it was "Sex Patrol".
The black album came out when I was in junior high, so I guess that fits the bill pretty well.
For far too many years into adulthood I thought the lyrics to AC/DCs hit song was
Dunder is not any word in familiar with. I have no idea why I never questioned this.
My brother and I always thought it was "Dirty deeds and the Dunder Chiefs". We had agreed that the Dunder Chiefs were sort of like steampunk dwarves that went around doing "dirty deeds". Kind of like pirates I guess? I haven't thought about my headcanon for that song in years.
No misheard lyrics jump out to me. I know it's happened to me before, but I can't recall anything specific.
However, there's a related affliction that I suffer from severely. Whenever a song comes on that was ever parodied by Weird Al or featured in Neil Cicierega's Mouth series, I hear the Weird Al/Mouth versions of them in the back of my mind.
Affliction? Sounds like a feature to me. :)
I sometimes have trouble remembering how The Ghostbusters theme sounds thanks to Neil's Bustin' video. I consider this to be a very good thing.
My childhood was in the '90s and early '00s, but my parents listened to oldies stations on the radio (which at the time meant mostly '80s music), and my personal tastes were more towards classical and… Weird Al. And so something like 70% of my knowledge of '90s and '00s pop music is from Weird Al, not the original artist. There's a lot of songs that I instantly recognize but don't know the actual words to.
(Also Smells Like Nirvana is highly relevant to this topic.)
Fly Away and Ghostbusters have been permanently altered in my head.
"Smoke on the water, fire in the sink." by Deep Purple. As an 11 year old kid I thought it was a song about a kitchen fire. No internet back then to check the actual lyrics.
The ants are my friends, they're blowing in the wind.... the ants are blowing in the wind!
Gala - Freed From Desire
Had no idea what the hell a trombolise was, but it's still a great dancing tune. I think it was only a year or two that I learned her love has got his strong beliefs, when I saw the lyrics on Spotify.
Can't Buy Me Love by The Beatles.
I always misheard the line
as
This had me stumped for years. I genuinely thought it was an awkward way of saying 'well, I wouldn't go to a protest over it'. Because the difference isn't immediately phonetically obvious, I was never corrected even when playing the song on guitar or singing along with friends. It wasn't until I heard a cover years later where the gap between 'too' and 'much' was moved to between 'care' and 'too' that it clicked, much to my embarrassment as a self-professed Beatles fan.
I kept hearing this song by Happie on the radio and thought the chorus was:
f#$kin hell, bet you fail
if I fail, it's your fault
It made a bit more sense once I looked up the song title.
"Well I'm not the world's most masculine man
But I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man
And so is Lola"
I always misheard "I'm glad" as "in bed" which makes the song's meaning a bit more blatant.
Spoilers!
These all stem from extremely low-quality audio playback devices from my childhood. TVs with muffled audio, terrible on-ear headphones, audio played from cassettes or cheap CDs then played back with crappy late 90's earphones (what we used to call earbuds back in the day.)
"Blinded by the light, wrapped up like a douche [revved up like a deuce], another runner in the night." - Blinded by the Light / Manfred Mann
"I bend like glass [I'm bent like glass], second-hand like glory, missed the bus but I'm in no hurry, molasses bass [fast], no business born. One foot in the hole, one foot gettin' deeper, crank it to a Leno [crank it to eleven], blow another speaker and I ain't got, I ain't got much to lose..." - I've Seen Better Days / Citizen King
"Gonna maka braka faka taka alaka shaka [Gonna make a brake and take a fake I'd like a stinking aching shake] … Gotta gettysetta clubs gotta findykinda nubs just so my irons are always flying off the backswing [Gonna get set of better clubs gonna find the kind with tiny nubs just so my irons aren't always flying off the back swing] … Birchmastdy a [Birchmount Stadium] home of the Robbie" - One Week / Barenaked Ladies -- I still love this song but I refuse to sing along.
Those are the top three that always come to mind.
The Manfred Mann "wrapped up like a douche" is so awesome hah. But you're demanding me to find new info with your other options! LOVE IT!
I always thought they made those lyrics hard to sing on purpose. The rhythm of the speech reminds me a lot of the song Mairzy Dotes. I used to think he was saying something in Latin at the end: (Birch) maste dium, and was sure it meant something interesting.
My wife’s rendition of Blink 182 made me smile the first time I heard it:
Always, I know
You'll be at my show
Watching, waiting
Come, misery teen
My ex called me his little windmill, and that kinda has stuck (okay has a lotta stuck) and also the music video is still one of my favs! ;D
Didn't know about intent of the original song but my college roommate informed "the real lyrics" to Eifel 65s, "I'm Blue" are not
But instead are
I had just recently watched the music video for that. The 90s were an even weirder place than I remwmber them.
I got in a lot of arguments as a kid because everybody wanted there to be words, but it's just weird scat! Nevermind that "if I were green I would die" sounds nothing like what they say. Or that the song is officially "Blue (Da Ba Dee)". This was mostly before you could just look stuff up on a whim.
This one is a little different in that I always knew I was mishearing the lyrics, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what they were supposed to be. For probably 35 years I must never have heard a DJ announce the title "Bette Davis Eyes," because if I had, I would've realized that the line wasn't "she's got better days aside," which makes no sense.
It's especially odd because occasionally I'd hear someone say "Bette Davis eyes" as a reference, but I never put together that it was a reference to this song specifically. I even knew it was a reference to a song called "Bette Davis Eyes," but I never realized it was referring to that song because I couldn't make out the line in the chorus.
I don't recall when or how the dots got connected for me, but the feeling that making the connection gave me was reminiscent of the feeling I got as a kid when I realized that two roads in my hometown that we always took to go to different destinations were actually right next to and ran parallel to each other. My mental map of the universe underwent a sudden, dramatic and almost wholly inconsequential realignment, and I couldn't tell anyone about this revolution in thought because they'd just say, "of course Railroad Ave and the Expressway are right next to each other and run parallel. Of course the song is about a girl with weird eyes like Bette Davis had."
For some reason I decided "she knows just what it takes to make a strobelight."
I went back and listened for that line, and my agéd, Internet-addled brain went to "she knows just what it takes to make a probe Lush." O! The advances we've made as a species in the field of teledildonics in the last 40 years!
Another thing that occurred to me on re-listening to that song–aside from that Kim Carnes perpetually sounded like she desperately needed to clear her throat–is that a lot of these misheard lyrics were probably down to the shit audio quality of commercial radio back in the day. Both "Bette Davis Eyes" and "pro blush" came through crystal clear on YouTube, even with their compression. If you misinterpret lyrics today it's probably due to funky enunciation or the lyrics themselves being nonsensical.
Dumbest one has to be me mishearing “Who Can It Be Now” by Men At Work as “You’ll Get A Beat Down”.
Years of only hearing it on radio and never seeing song title led to that.
Gonna start using this to the same tune when I play a game that involves attaching.
I think Ken Lee fits in this topic.
Absolute classic
You know the song "Our Lips are Sealed"? I only know the Hilary Duff cover, and for years I thought it was "Alex Saseal". Like, someone's name. I guess "Alex Cecile" would be more name-like (and still pronounced the same way), but... I very specifically imagined seals the animal when I heard that "name".
Do incomprehensible songs count, or is that cheating?
The Black Crowes - Hard To Handle
I always interpreted La Roux's "Bulletproof" as "now I'm burnin' through" instead of "now I'm bulletproof".
This is not exactly what you are asking for as it was a mistake I made as a child. Hoping you find this amusing.
The song A Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down from Mary Poppins.
I learned the first line as 'In every job that must be done there is an elephant of fun'.
When I was about 8 years old, I heard Eric Carmen's Hungry Eyes for the first time and thought it was about the cute glassy eyes of a hamster named Humphrey. I think I figured out my mistake pretty quickly, but I can't listen to that song now without thinking of hamsters.
I thought of another one. Hook by Blues Traveler:
I also was confused about the title of the song itself, because for a long time I thought the chorus of the song was:
Extra funny because I guess that part of the song is sometimes referred to as "the hook". 😅
I'm glad someone mentioned this song, because when they say
I don't know what the hell I thought they were saying, but it definitely wasn't that...
"I don't think you're ready, Hostess Jenny"
Shift manager isn't going to put Hostess Jenny on a full table section because, well, she's just not ready.
One more, from one of the Ramona books by Beverley Clearly. They are learning the (American) national anthem, and she wants to know what a Donzer is. You know, as in "Oh say, can you see by the donzerly light."
From Somewhere I Belong — Linkin Park
I misheard that first line as…
…which didn't really make sense but for some reason I didn't question it.
Of Monsters and Men - Wolves Without Teeth
"You hump me like a hummingbird,
Hump me in my sleep"
I cannot think of this line any other way, even if I know the lyrics l
Too much nutmeg, too much nutmeg!
*Looks at back of CD case*
3. Too Much Nothing
Yeah that makes more sense.
Broken Bells - The Mall & Misery
Line: The dead mouths it costs to be... [alive]
I hear as Deadmau5 accosted me...
No one has mentioned "excuse me while I kiss this guy" yet from Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix? That feels like one of the first times that a misheard lyric got popular.
An oldie: Chris de Burgh's Don't Pay the Ferryman warns, "Don't even fix a price." Unless you're young me, thinking it was "Don't name him Vincent Price." Creepy guy, yeah, that makes total sense.
Christmas bonus: As a child I assumed the "Holy Infantso, tender and mild" in Silent Night was an old-fashioned way to say Holy infant.
"Bobber Ann, take my hand..." (Barbara Ann by the Beach Boys)
I definitely thought this was a much dirtier song than it really is. I was afraid my grandpa would crash the car from laughing so hard when I asked him how they got away with that when I was 13. Not quite as wild as an employee I had once though.
He told a story of how, when him and his sister were growing up, she made a comment about how crazy progressive the song was for the time, with a man singing about how he wanted another to take his hand, since she always heard it as "Bob Barand, take my hand".
My other one that comes to mind is Walking on Broken Glass by Annie Lennox-- I've always heard the chorus as "walking on, walking on walking back".
When I first heard Janet Jackson's Broken Hearts Heal from her 2015 album Unbreakable, I was quite amazed by the song's lyrics. Now, for context, you must understand that:
And so, somehow, this is roughly what I heard at the beginning of the song:
It was a long long time ago
But I remember it like yesterday
Amazing times while we were growing
Around all the protestants that the world could see
We made up songs to do what Jehovah's do
And harmonised when we all did our part
That's to say, no wait for most anything
Always forsaken in Jehovah's love
I knew this couldn't be right but I was listening from streaming and my CD copy with the lyric book hadn't yet arrived.
The actual lyrics for the first verse are:
It was a long long time ago
But I remember it like yesterday
Amazing times while we were growing
Round all the brightest stars the world had seen
We made-up songs to do our chores to
And harmonized while we all did our part
Danced and sang our way through most anything
Always felt safe in each others' love
Still sing it, turns the song into a surreal trip or deep philosophical discussion
I think it’s actually:
All of us stand and point our fingers
For the longest time I thought that in Linkin Park's New Divide, Chester was saying
"I remembered each flash, as time began to purr"
It's really...
For anyone who hasn't heard of Peter Kay, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpdUkqmrkCY