• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Songs you "misheard" the first time you heard them

Note that the official printed lyrics of a song don't always match what is actually sung, because they were prepared in advance based on how the lyricist wrote them, not how the artist actually sung them.

For example in the Keith Urban song "I Wanna Be Your Man Forever", the official line printed in the album's lyrics is "The one I want beside me for eternity", but what he actually sings is the grammatically incorrect "The one I want beside me for eternally" [sic].

And sometimes even after listening to the song repeatedly and paying close attention, I can't get my ears to un-hear my "misheard" lyrics and hear the "correct" lyrics, and again I wonder if there's an actual mismatch?

In Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive", the official line is "It took all the strength I had not to fall apart", but I just can't un-hear "It took all the shit I had not to fall apart".

Same with Billy Joel's "Allentown". The official line is "For the promises our teachers gave", but I can't un-hear "For the promise is our future's gay" (as in happy, cheerful). He doesn't enunciate the "-ve" in "gave" at all.
 
kevtronics said:
How about misheard commercials? The commercials for GoodRX say the name so quickly and with such poor enunciation that it sounds like GutterX. The first few times I heard the ad, I literally thought it was for a gutter cleaning service.
Click to expand...
I have the same difficulty with both the fabricated company names, particularly web services and with the strange names Chinese companies use for products to be sold in the U.S.

In the case of the Chinese products, it almost seems like they take one syllable from a word and combine it with a syllable from another word, almost at random.

Saving the worst for last: prescription medications.

Honorable mention: Audacy. An all-audio company that picked a name that is not spelled as it sounds.
 
kevtronics said:
For example in the Keith Urban song "I Wanna Be Your Man Forever", the official line printed in the album's lyrics is "The one I want beside me for eternity", but what he actually sings is the grammatically incorrect "The one I want beside me for eternally" [sic].
Click to expand...
You don't speak Southern.

When I briefly worked in Alabama, I started off by correcting people only to be told, "that's what I said". Gave up, realizing that this is no different than New England English and Australian or Jamaican English.
 
You may be surprised to know that the line in Seal's "Kiss from a Rose" is not "kiss from a rose on the grave". It's "kiss from a rose on the grey". He has never explained what that is supposed to mean...
 
The Peter Gabriel song in French that sounds like "She's, so popular. "

Once heard a dj say, " She's so what?"

Never knew they Beatles were saying "Shoot me" in "Come Together "
 
kevtronics said:
Keith Urban was born in New Zealand and grew up in Australia. But anyone who sings Country music is quickly taught how to emulate a Southern "twang".
Click to expand...
Jo Dee Messina, best known for her '90s hit (revived in modified form this decade by Cole Swindell) "Heads Carolina, Tails California," is from the Boston suburb of Holliston, Mass. You'd never know it by the way she sings.

And the accent doesn't have to be taught. Southern accents are easy to absorb in a relatively short time if you spent time in a Southern state. When I came back to New England from Arkansas after three years of newspaper work, it took me almost a year to lose my assimilated twang. I can still slip into a pretty good approximation of the accent, even though I left that state in 1981.
 
tbolt909 said:
If you can't tell the difference between CRUEL and COOL, you're hearing is severely impaired...
Click to expand...
Google phonetic spelling cruel and you get "krool". Google phonetic spelling of cool and you get "kool". If one is singing, you naturally trend to emphasize the beginning and the end of a word unless you go down the "formal / opera" training route. Nick was not formally trained and he did not emphasize the middle r sound.

BTW I f you mispronounced cruel as a 2 syllable word (an Appalachian thing) the r is easy to hear. The first time I "heard" Cruel to Be kind was the MTV video that had a wedding. Usually weddings are happy joyful events the word "cruel" doesn't come to mind to most people.
 
For decades (since I was a little kid until just recently), I actually thought the chorus of "Bennie And The Jets" went;

She's got electric boobs!
Her mom has two!
You know I read it in a magazine!

It was really:

She's got electric boots!
A mohair suit!
You know I read it in a magazine!

I'm so lucky this never came up any time I had a karaoke mic shoved in my face......
 
tbolt909 said:
"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...
Click to expand...
My mother heard that song incessantly at school when it came out.

She's pretty open to listening to any sort of music from back then (especially folk), but that one song she can't stand.

I can't say I blame her; I don't much care for it either.

c
 
tbolt909 said:
"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...
Click to expand...
Shortly after that song came out, I opened the first discotheque in Quito, Ecuador. Because the song had no meaning, in English or Spanish I named the disco "Louie Louie". We used radio tape cartridges for some of the music in the venue, and one thing we did was play a line from the hook of "Louie Louie" every so often between full dance songs.
 
cc333 said:
My mother heard that song incessantly at school when it came out.

She's pretty open to listening to any sort of music from back then (especially folk), but that one song she can't stand.

I can't say I blame her; I don't much care for it either.

c
Click to expand...
My mom also remembered "Louie Louie" when it came out "I thought those guys were drunk", she said.

She said most people back then really thought "Louie Louie" was just a weird novelty song and not much else.
 


Back
Top Bottom