We’ve had lots of mondegreen threads, but I was thinking; What about songs where not only do you not hear the right lyrics, but your brain can’t even make up fake ones? The words sound garbled or otherwise unintelligible to you.
A good example is Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow”. Unless you hear the song a bunch of times it sounds like Eddie’s mumbling the verses.
For me I’ll also add The Black Crows “Hard to handle”. I understand most of the lyrics, and even though I know he’s singing, “Cause mama I’m sure hard to handle, now
Gets around” To me the words are blurred together and sounds like gibberish.
So what songs have lyrics that you can’t make out without looking them up?
Off the top of my head
In a gadda da vida baby, don’t you know that I love you.
In a gadda da vida honey, don’t you know that I’ll always be true.
Oh won’t you come with me, and take my hand.
Oh won’t you come with me, and walk this land.
Then again, when I think of the song, all I can think of is the Slayer heavy metal cover on the “Less than Zero” soundtrack.
The Queen song “Headlong” starts with the lyrics “And you’re rushing headlong…”. For years, I was sure the words were “Anti-Russian hand dog”, and wondered what the hell the song was about.
Also, I wanted an anti-Russian hand dog. It sounded like a cool thing to have.
To be honest I have this problem at some point with about 50% of all songs. One example that springs to mind is **Nirvana’**s Lithium. For the life of me I couldn’t work out what he was singing after
I’m so ugly, but that’s OK, 'cause so are you
The next line sounds like
Brookham ears
I couldn’t think what it was supposed to be, so I just sang that in my head for many years. I finally looked it up. It’s “Broke all mirrors”. That American pronunciation or “mirrors” threw me.
UK (England, to be precise), and I pronounce it “mirrahs”. Some Americans pronounce it in a way that sounds similar to “meers”, to me. More like “meerers”, but the first and second Rs almost merge.
Definitely “broke our mirrors” (not “all”), according to several lyrics websites I just checked.
But I think I misread the OP, so apologies for that. I thought we were looking for lyrics for which we couldn’t find plausible words.
No problem. Mainly I’m looking for songs where you can’t make out what they’re saying just by listening. The words sound garbled, all run together, or in other ways impossible, or almost impossible to make out unless you’ve been told the words, read liner notes, or looked them up on-line.
Wasn’t part of the movie **Jumping Jack Flash **something about Whoopie Goldberg trying to make out what Mick Jagger was saying in that song? He is considered pretty unintelligible when he is selling and strutting hard…
Informer by Snow is pretty notorious for being so difficult to understand that you can’t even really make up anything. It doesn’t even sound like words, just badabadabadabada.
