This is now the title of a weekly comic strip in the Boston free newspaper The Dig.
My personal favorite is my mondegreened version of Seal’s Kiss from a Rose. I persistently mishear “grey” as “grave”. I think changing “kiss from a rose on the grey” to “kiss from a rose on the grave” has a pretty substantial impact for changing a single word. Personally, I like it much better as “grave”, so I make no effort to correct myself.
My favorite was my daughter’s mondegreen of a Cher song that she thought was titled “Gypsy Transit Thieves,” who evidently got on subways without paying the fare.
I hear that one too - it sounds SO clear to me that I’m not entirely convinced that they aren’t singing “Fucking alibi” and claiming that the words are “broken lullabye”.
The one that no one ever seems to be able to understand:
Big Ol’ Jet Airliner, by the Steve Miller Band.
In fact, I’m willing to bet uh… five cents, that someone reading this thread will say “Whoa, THAT’S what they’re saying?”
I thought they were saying “We all go down to Carolina”. My ex husband thought it was “We all get down in a line up” Apparently “Big Ole Jed and Lila” is also a popular guess. I even saw a bus with the ad “Who ARE Bingo Jed and Lila, anyway?” (or something to that effect).
Well, in this thread so far, I have just found out that Seal’s Kiss from a Rose says “grey” and not “grave,” and that Groovin’ (On a Sunday Afternoon) does not say “You and me and Leslie,” though I have no idea what it could say…
:smack:
You and me endlessly, perhaps? 
And add me to the “Kiss from a rose on a grave”. Had never occured to me that it might not be that, I thought it was just some dark poetic imagery or something.
It’s “you and me, endlessly,” but the music puts the accent on “less.” I still like to pretend it’s “and Leslie,” though.
RealityChuck, “Gypsy Transit Theives” – I love it!
What?!? It’s not “might meet her”? Oops. :o
And I’m about the eleventyth person in this thread who thought it was “Take the back right turn”.
A friend of mine thought Sting (in “Every Breath You Take”) was singing “I’m a pool hall ace”, instead of “How my poor heart aches”.
A classic of mine is when I heard “Jingle Bells” as a child and always wondered what a “Four horsopen sleigh” was.
Oh, I have to throw in another one that I always add to these:s
Peter Gabriel’s “Games without Frontiers”
I was sure that the line was “She’s so… POPular” but it turns out that the line is actually (and sung by Kate Bush) “Jeux sans frontieres” (Games without frontiers, in French).
Another one I remembered: For years, I misheard The Who’s “Who Are You?” as “Ooo, Allen.” And I’m surprised at the number of people who thought the Beatles were giving them driving directions, although now that I sound it out I can definitely understand the confusion.
Uh, yeah. What the hell does “a kiss from a rose on the grey” mean? At least a grave is actually a physical thing, and you can imagine someone dropping a rose onto one in mourning. I can’t recall the last time I felt anything on my “grey.”
[sub]although there was that one time, at band camp … :: d&r :: [/sub]
I blush to admit that I was in my twenties before I realized that the line in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds wasn’t “The girls with colitis go by.”
Hey, it was the Beatles. It was possible.
When I was a kid, I thought the Go-Go Gophers song said ‘Colonel’s a doggie too, soon disappear’.
I had a problem with the same line, except I always heard it as “She’s so fa-dee-la”. I was sure it wasn’t right (since it makes no sense), but I didn’t know what it was supposed to be.
At first I heard Fuel’s “Jesus or a Gun” as “Jesus, Oregon”
As a youth I would always refer to small bible thumping towns as Jesus, Ohio or Jesus, Illinois…etc, so this made perfect sense to me.
Another one was Springsteen’s “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out”
For years I heard “Dead Devil in the Freezer” I still hear it in spite of being corrected.
Don’t even get me started on Rusted Root. Even when reading the liner notes I still can’t hear what they are allegedly saying. It always sounds unintelligible to me. It doesn’t help that most of their lyrics are so stream of consciousness.
I know there are many more since I am the queen of mishearing things, I just can’t think of them right now
This one’s very obscure.
Georgia Pacific (a defunct local band in Bellingham, WA) had a song called Tin Can Gun. Every word in the lyric has three letters.
Actual: Say tin can gun / Buy the sun
Mondegreen: Satan can come / by the sun
Guy in my office thought Hookah was the name of the caterpiller: (
); I had to get him a picture of a hookah before he’d believe me.
nice coding, kay
I always thought that Steve Miller song was, Big Ol’ Jet had a Light On. (and I thought, “good idea!”)
My daughter once requested that I play a song for her called “Eleven O’Clock.” Took a little while to figure out that she wanted to hear Eminence Front, but I thought it was a darn good try for a little girl who didn’t have the word “eminence” in her vocabulary at the time. She also once referred to Mike and the Mechanics’ Silent Running as the song that went, “Can you hear me? Can you hear me brother?”
Speaking of Steve Miller, it sounds as if he had a ‘mondegreen moment’ when he ripped off Vernon Green. Vernon Green wrote of ‘puppetutes’, which Miller mis-plagiarised as ‘pompatus’ in The Joker.
Me too! To this day I call my SO “Secret Asian Man” (who is Chinese, BTW).