Song lyrics you deliberately sing wrong

“…a kiss from a rose on the grave.”

The original lyric in Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose” is “a kiss from a rose on the gray”. I originally mondegreened it as “grave”, and later decided that I preferred my version.

I also change the first two lines in the final verse of “The Dark Lady” to

“And now late at night, when a storm fills the sky,
A lone ship can be seen, sailing in its eye.”

That’s a fairly large change from the original (as best I can tell), but it’s much closer to the version I first heard from the Shantyman; the only change I made to that version is swapping “ghost” for “lone”. It seems to me that it works better that way, and it saves “ghost” for the final chorus.