James Blunt’s song “Wisemen” had my favourite “mondegreen”, or so I thought. There’s a line that sounds just like"those three wise men, they’ve got a semi by the sea" (“semi” is slang for a modest house that forms half of a structure, a “semi-detached” house).
But apparently, that is actually the correct lyric. James Blunt really is talking about three guys who own a semi-detached house near the sea. Any other examples of lyrics that sound so wrong that you assume you’ve humorously misheard them?
Pearl Jam’s Cropduster contains the chorus “I thought the world, turns out the world thought me” which I always assumed had to be “I BOUGHT the world, turns out the world BOUGHT me” (which is a far more interesting line) even though I was always hearing THOUGHT.
I remember once asking a friend if the song was “just another manic Monday” or “just an automatic Monday,” because it sounded like it could go either way. I don’t recall her actually answering the question–perhaps she didn’t understand what I was asking. I felt justified years later when I found out it was “manic.” Googling now, I see a lot of people thought it was “automatic.”
(Oh, and when my husband told me that line about “alligator lizards in the air,” I thought “Noooo, that can’t be right…” and went and looked it up…)
I thought STP’s “Plush” contained the lines
“Where you goin’ for tomorrow?
Where you goin’ with that mask you found?
When I hear when I hear when the dogs begin to smell her,
will she stand along?”
Then I figured out that since the dogs were beginning to smell her, the line had to be
“where you goin’ with that mastiff hound?”
Since “mask you found” makes no sense at all. But that’s what the line is.
There’s a line in the chorus of 36 Degrees by Placebo that sounds like “Some of them tried to do me ache” but I always assumed I was mishearing as it makes no sense. Maybe “Some of them tried to deviate”?
No, turns out I was right. Well, almost, the actual line is “Someone tried to do me ache”. I still haven’t the faintest clue what it’s supposed to mean though.
For the longest time I refused to believe that the famously cryptic phrase from Steve Miller’s “The Joker” was indeed " . . .the pompatus of love". I was much too wise to fall for that (even though it clearly sounds exactly like what it is). I took much pride in explaining that he was actually saying “. . . the properties of love”, 'cause, ya know, I’m smart like that :smack:
I still remember seeing this song on Top of the Pops - you know, the relatively staid and august BBC pop-music show. Well, this was in the days when they’d just got a whizzy new computer-graphics system, so the title of artist and track wouldn’t just appear on the screen, it would zoom on, assemble itself in some kind of flashy way, spin about a bit and fly off. Well, when the title for this song came onto the bottom of the screen, the words reassembled into a stick-figure, the arm of which them moved to its crotch and rubbed up and down before the words flew apart again.
I was like “Uh, no, I did not just see that!”, but I swear it’s true.
I couldn’t figure it out! I could have sworn I heard “Sugar Bear” and I’m sitting there thinking to myself that there was no way Elton John was singing about breakfast cereal, but I couldn’t imagine what it actually was. I just thought it was one of those incomprehensible lyrics.
Speaking of Elton John, “Goodbye Yellow-Brick Road” was a mix for me. On the one hand, I couldn’t believe “hunting the horny-back toad” was correct, but it was.
OTOH, “Back to the howling old owl in the woods” became something about Hollywood, and the penthouse something about a pen pal. :smack:
On a slightly different tip, there’s phrases I heard correctly but misunderstood:
“When you got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose”: I thought he was just repeating “you got nothin’” for emphasis, not for the meaning of the whole sentence. :smack: :smack:
I thought for sure I wasn’t understanding the lyrics to Superchicks “One Girl Revolution,” but she is singing about a rifle, after all. I have to admit, I like the song less now.
I wear a disguise
I’m just your average jane
The super doesn’t stand for model
But that doesn’t mean I’m plain
If all you see is how I look
You miss the superchick within
And I christen you titanic underestimate and swim
I’ve got the rifle gonna be myself
I’ve got the rifle gonna be myself
My cousin, my boyfriend, and I were riding along, listening to my 80’s mix CD. We got to “New Moon on Monday” by Duran Duran, and I started talking about how nothing in that song makes a lick of sense (no, really). I was just singing along, spouting the “crazy” lines like, “Shake up the picture, the lizard mixture…”
I mean, bwuh? But when we got back to my place I looked up the words, and I was mostly right. The only one I got wrong (which my boyfriend had right), was “I stayed the cold day, with the lonely side of life.” It’s actually “lonely satellite.”
The song “Past the Mission” by Tori Amos has a line so inane (IMHO) I thought I must be mishearing it: “Past the mission
I once knew a hot girl”
I always corrected it to “hired girl” in my head, and recast the song to be about a tourist in Cuba learning about what was really going on in the country from a maid or housekeeper…
