Not a case of misheard lyrics, just not-listened-to lyrics: I initially thought “Smoke on the water, fire in the sky” was a pretty cool lyric. Then I find out it’s just about a hotel burning down, with emphasis on how inconvenient that was for recording an album. Zzzzzzzz
Heh, I was going to post a similar thread (and kept forgetting about it-I really need to keep a “SD Thread Idea” notebook close at hand): “When your Mondegreen is better than the actual lyric.”
Mine would be Lush’s “Sweetness and Light”. My version of the chorus is as follows:
You are the Sweetness and the Light
You are the purple in the sky
The actual (apparent) one:
You are the Sweetness and the Light
You are an apple in disguise
Which isn’t exactly horrible, exactly, but I still like mine better. Damned fuzzed out shoegaze vocals…
Your thought is prolly what was meant anyway…
Mentioned a number of times before, but in Elton John’s Someone Saved My Life Tonight I heard the following lyrics:
Which I thought I was mishearing… WTF does that even mean? I’ve gotta have it wrong, right? There’s no way EJ is referencing a cartoon character created to market cereal in a song about his suicide.
So I figured out that what EJ must be singing is this…
Which makes more sense, imho.
So I go along with this mondegreen until I mentioned it in another mondegreen thread here 'bout 2-7 years ago (I’ve been on these boards for a while), whereupon I was told that the original lyric (the Sugar Bear lyric) was correct.
Faw! It is now obvious: Elton John (well, Bernie Taupin) knows shit about songwriting. 
When I first heard the song “Tik Tok” I thought the line was “'Till we see the Satellite.” I thought that was a weird and interesting lyric for a pop song which made me like it.
I later learned she was saying “Sunlight” which is Yawn. But I swear it still sounds like “Satellite” to me unless I say “Sunlight” in my head.
Funny thing… it happened just this past weekend.
There’s a verse in Lou Christie’s “Make You Mine” that goes:
I’ll be a hard-lovin’, pushin’ kind of individual
Knockin’ night and day at your door
You’ll have to turn me away like an indestructible force
All my life, I thought that last line was “indestructible boar,” and was a clever (and remarkably literate) reference to the Twelve Labors of Hercules. I’m disillusioned to find out that it’s not. And now that I think about it, it was the Nemean Lion, not the Erymanthian Boar, that was indestructible, so it would have been wrong anyway.
Yes, the Beatles’ “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes” is so uninspiring, compared to “the girl with colitis goes by.”
And then there’s Billy Joel’s “I am an elephant man.”
Some songwriters would do a lot better if they just sang the wrong words in the first place.
Just found one today, in Wolfpack by Syd Barrett, I thought he sang:
“Magnesium robots and subs”
which makes sense, since the lyrics can be interpreted as describing an attack by a wolf pack of submarines. And magnesium robots are pretty cool-sounding, and sounds like the sort of thing you’d throw into a psychedelic-era song about an oceanic battle (since magnesium does have a metallic-yet-oceanic-ness to it.)
But it’s actually
“Magnesium proverbs and sobs” … what does that even mean?