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Songs you "misheard" the first time you heard them

S

secondchoice

I know this sounds crazy but have you ever heard a song the first time and your brain doesn't always get the lyrics correct?

My two are:

George Benson's Give Me the Night. For some reason I thought it was some kind of gang fighting anthem: "GIVE ME THE KNIFE". After the second time I heard it I realized my mental error.

Nick Lowe's Cruel to be Kind which I thought was a really good song when I thought it was: "COOL TO BE KIND"
 
secondchoice said:
I know this sounds crazy but have you ever heard a song the first time and your brain doesn't always get the lyrics correct?

My two are:

George Benson's Give Me the Night. For some reason I thought it was some kind of gang fighting anthem: "GIVE ME THE KNIFE". After the second time I heard it I realized my mental error.

Nick Lowe's Cruel to be Kind which I thought was a really good song when I thought it was: "COOL TO BE KIND"
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If you can't tell the difference between CRUEL and COOL, you're hearing is severely impaired...
 
Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space”. I thought she was singing, “Got a lot of Starbucks lovers” and it’s “Got a long list of ex lovers”!
 
So, back in my high school years, "Paradise City" by Guns N' Roses was released. Some years pass by and I meet my now deceased wife. Early 90's at this point. It was our third date, if I recall correctly. May have been the fourth or fifth. Too many years ago to keep track. Anyway, the song comes on "101 KLOL" down in Houston and she reaches for the tuner knob to turn the volume up and then proceeds to sing "Take me down to the very nice city, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. Oh won't you please take me home."

I swore I had misheard her. C'mon now! Axl Rose "is soooo hot!" according to her. But, she did it again on the next verse. I thought about it for a second, and then said "You know it's Paradise City, right? I mean, it's the name of the entire song!"

Without going into further details, there was no paradise to be had that evening, and from then on forward she was hesitant to ever sing anything in front of me again.
 
Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind" has a line that I thought for years was "Just like a paperback novel, the kind that just don't sell." It was actually "the kind that drugstores sell," but even in my high school years (when that song came out), I was still thinking like someone involved with print media, which, of course, is what I became!
 
K.M. Richards said:
Forgive me for this, especially if it seems "cruel" under the circumstances, but if you can't tell the difference between YOU'RE and YOUR ... 😛
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Touche. Yes, the dreaded typo. An eyesight oversight.

In any event, maybe he also thought BLUE SUEDE SHOES was COOL BLUE SHOES. "Blinded by the Light" is a song that many misheard the word DEUCE as something I won't print here...
 
tbolt909 said:
"Blinded by the Light" is a song that many misheard the word DEUCE as something I won't print here...
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Bruce Springsteen made a point to thank the feminine hygiene industry for the popularity of the Manfred Mann's Earth Band version of his song.

And of course, we know that "There's a bathroom on the right." :LOL:
 
Not to mention Jimi Hendrix's "excuse me while I kiss this guy". (Purple Haze)
 
There are whole books dedicated to misheard lyrics. One that comes to mind for me is while working at an oldies station in the mid-90s. I was getting ready to relieve that afternoon jock. "Rock and Roll Heaven" was playing, where the Righteous Brothers were singing about artists who had passed. I'd heard one line as "Tom O'Jay's a friend we came to know", and I asked the afternoon guy "who is Tom O'Jay?". He told me no, the line is "Time won't change the friends we came to know".

I said "next you'll be telling me there's no bathroom on the right"
 
gr8oldies said:
There are whole books dedicated to misheard lyrics. One that comes to mind for me is while working at an oldies station in the mid-90s. I was getting ready to relieve that afternoon jock. "Rock and Roll Heaven" was playing, where the Righteous Brothers were singing about artists who had passed. I'd heard one line as "Tom O'Jay's a friend we came to know", and I asked the afternoon guy "who is Tom O'Jay?". He told me no, the line is "Time won't change the friends we came to know".
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The verse that contained that line was about Jim Croce. I always heard that line with "the friend" rather than "the friends." The lyrics sites -- which are just as unreliable as Wikipedia for the most part -- seem to think he sang "a friend we came to know." Whatever. I miss the days of Hit Parader magazine, which ran four pages of current hit lyrics every month, directly from the songs' publishers.
 
CTListener said:
The verse that contained that line was about Jim Croce. I always heard that line with "the friend" rather than "the friends." The lyrics sites -- which are just as unreliable as Wikipedia for the most part -- seem to think he sang "a friend we came to know." Whatever. I miss the days of Hit Parader magazine, which ran four pages of current hit lyrics every month, directly from the songs' publishers.
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I bought Hit Parader every time it came out. "A friend" makes sense. But we were not talking about anyone named Tom O'Jay like I thought.
 
tbolt909 said:
If you can't tell the difference between CRUEL and COOL, you're hearing is severely impaired...
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That is a mean thing to say. I have misinterpreted a number of song titles and lyrics over the years and there are many things to consider.

First, there are regional and ethnic differences in pronunciation. Although I don't want to get into a discussion of "why?", I can say that when I moved from Puerto Rico to Birmingham, Alabama I found that I could not understand half the people I talked with.

Second, songs have musical instruments in them. Duh. That means that the words are often blended with the music, sometimes to the point of making them hard to understand.

Finally, radio stations use and have used extreme limiting and compression since the 50's at least. The earlier devices, if pushed too hard, created audio mush. It was hard to understand lyrics if the station was trying to keep the mod monitor from ever going below 90%.
 
KeithE4 said:
Bruce Springsteen made a point to thank the feminine hygiene industry for the popularity of the Manfred Mann's Earth Band version of his song.

And of course, we know that "There's a bathroom on the right." :LOL:
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I could swear I put this in yesterday but it isn't here now: This is the same problem as America's "I Need You". On both songs, they slur into the word, "you", so it becomes, "I Knee Chew". "Wrapped Up Like A Deuce" is also followed by the word, "you", in the same slurring manner except "you" becomes "shoe".
 
DavidEduardo said:
That is a mean thing to say. I have misinterpreted a number of song titles and lyrics over the years and there are many things to consider.

First, there are regional and ethnic differences in pronunciation. Although I don't want to get into a discussion of "why?", I can say that when I moved from Puerto Rico to Birmingham, Alabama I found that I could not understand half the people I talked with.

Second, songs have musical instruments in them. Duh. That means that the words are often blended with the music, sometimes to the point of making them hard to understand.

Finally, radio stations use and have used extreme limiting and compression since the 50's at least. The earlier devices, if pushed too hard, created audio mush. It was hard to understand lyrics if the station was trying to keep the mod monitor from ever going below 90%.
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Mistaking CRUEL for COOL is a stretch. The person obviously was not listening very closely. Many people criticized early Rock and Roll as "unintelligible noise". Some might say the same about Country or Rap lyrics.

Lyrics are now easily available to find for clarification. Maybe some folks just prefer to hear what they want and enjoy the tunes. "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen is a good example of a song where the lyrics are irrelevant. Doesn't matter if anyone understands them, it's just about the vibe of the song...
 
secondchoice said:
I know this sounds crazy but have you ever heard a song the first time and your brain doesn't always get the lyrics correct?

My two are:

George Benson's Give Me the Night. For some reason I thought it was some kind of gang fighting anthem: "GIVE ME THE KNIFE". After the second time I heard it I realized my mental error.

Nick Lowe's Cruel to be Kind which I thought was a really good song when I thought it was: "COOL TO BE KIND"
Click to expand...
Too many for me to mention as I’ve always suffered from “lyricosis” 😃
 


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