There were songs that (for way too long than I’ll admit) I thought I knew the title to, simply by listening to the lyrics, without bothering to find out what the actual titles were.
Sure - in some of the following examples, the song titles are mentioned in the lyrics. However - to this listener’s ear, anyway - they didn’t seem prominent enough to grab me as being the title.
Zep’s “Fool in The Rain” I thought was “All the Love That I Found”
Queen - “You’re My Best Friend”/“You’re Making Me Live”
The Band - “The Weight”/“Take a Load Off Fanny” alternating with “Put the Load Right On Me”
Pretenders - “My City Was Gone”/“Way To Go Ohio”
another Zep - “Four Sticks”/“When the Owls Cry In the Night”
I’m sure there’s more if I clear more cobwebs away.
The lyrics “What’s going on?” for “What’s Up?” by Four Non-Blondes:
The title does not appear in the song’s lyrics. However, the phrase “what’s going on?” is prominently included in the chorus. The title was chosen to avoid confusion with Marvin Gaye’s 1971 song “What’s Going On.”
The most recent one I can think of that I didn’t have correct was Katy Perry and Kanye West’s “Extraterrestrial,” whose title is just “E.T.”
I’m somewhat of a trivia buff, so I pay attention to song titles and notice when they don’t match up with the lyrics. That doesn’t happen much with popular music nowadays – I heard on an interview with some music business person that execs are trying to keep artists from doing that so people can find the songs more easily on YouTube/Spotify/etc. Looking through the Billboard #1s of the 2010s, I’d say that only “E.T.” and Usher’s “OMG” are the only songs that even barely break that rule. You’d have to go back to “Empire State of Mind” (which was technically #1 on 1/1/2010, since the first chart of 2010 came out the next day) to find a major exception.
Not quite the same thing, but I got the idea that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was also called “Nevermind.” The word is in the song, but it’s not a repeated lyric. It’s the first song on the album Nevermind, which is how I got the idea.
I don’t remember not knowing that “Escape” was “The Pina Colada Song,” because when I was only about 11, I saw an interview on TV with Rupert Holmes, where he ranted about people getting the name wrong. Seriously. He practically was a toddler having a tantrum about it. It made an impression on me, because I was pretty young, and I was a little shocked to see an adult acting like that over something that seemed trivial to me.
That was a deeply affecting story and is one of the reasons why I enjoy the SDMB, and we can only hope that he was wearing his tinted glasses at the time.
I think most of us can guess why the title “Rainy Day Women #12 and #35” can be a little misleading.
“Weekend in New England” by Barry Manilow. I thought it was “When Will I Hold You Again”, the last line of the chorus, repeated three times. According to wikipedia, “the only reference to the title is the line, “Time in New England took me away…”, and the word “weekend” is never mentioned at all.”
“Long Train Running” (you know, the one that should have been titled “Without love, where would you be now”).
“Shiny Yellow Taxi” (You know, the one that should have been titled either “You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone” or “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot”).
I kept hearing people talk about a Stevie Wonder song called “Sir Duke,” which I assumed I had never heard. When I finally hunted it up on YouTube, I realized that of course I had heard it many times. I had just assumed that it was called “You Can Feel It All Over.”
