Not sure how often this turns up as a topic. So m’pologies if it’s old…
But I am listending to live and let die. And every time I hear it I hear the lyrics as follows…
“When you’ve got a job to do you’ve got to do it well. You’ve got to give the other fella hell.”
But it’s supposed to be “Give the other man a hand”
Anyone else hear it like I do?
Misheard lyrics to Christmas songs are immortalized as ‘mondegreens.’
this site is all about 'em: http://www.kissthisguy.com/
I didn’t hear Live and Let Die that way, but I always heard “Big Jet Airliner” as “Big Ol’ Chet and Lionel”
Huh?
I remember complaints when this song came out from local community leaders because of the swearing!
I always thought the first line of “Little Bit of Soul” was, “When you’re feeling alone and a fish walks by…”
And I never thought it was all that odd, because hey, it was the 60s, after all.
I rarely misheard the common lyrics (never heard kiss this guy), but I did wildly misunderstand lyrics no one else did. One example: Danger Zone (that song from Top Gun). I’d never seen the movie, just heard the song and instead of hearing “danger zone” I’d hear “nine-fifth hour”. Some years later I saw the movie, finally understood the real words and felt every inch the crazy person I was.
My first concert at the age of 15 in the mid 70’s … I thought the Doobie Bros. hit China Grove (which I apparently hadn’t heard before) was a teen anthem with the impassioned refrain “Trying to Grow”!
I thought AC/DC’s “Dirty deeds done dirt cheap” was Dirty jeans, tight, tight jeans.
The Police’ message in a bottle, I know he says five hundred years have passed since I wrote my note; however, I always hear five hundred years have passed since I broke my nose. I like my version.
There’s a Keith Urban song, “You’ll Think of Me” that goes, “take your cat and leave my sweater” and but I thought it was “take your Kathy Lee (?) sweater” and I thought it was some kind of diss toward a person who wears Kathy Lee Gifford’s line of discount store clothing. Even though there was an extra syllable in there, my mind was still set on it for a long time. Even though it’s not how the song goes, I still imagine the person he’s singing to wears Kathy Lee clothes and that’s one of the reasons they’re breaking up.
“Livin’ just to find emotion” in Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” is immortalized in the best flash EVER as “Heaven is a funky moose.” I confess that until recently, I had no idea what the line actually was.
(The flash can be found here.
In the Prince song, if she is a Sexy Motherfucker why is she shaving her ass?
John Fogerty in a TV concert once made fun of his own song Bad Moon Rising when he sang the chorus as: “There’s a bathroom on the right”, as he pointed in that direction.
Then, there is the line that I always hear in Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show:
“Pack up the babies and cram the old ladies…”
“Blinded by the light, wrapped up like a douche, you know, the rumor in the night”
Ah, Bruce, get those marbles out of your mouth.
For the Shakira song, “Objection”, I honestly thought the lyric was:
“Objection, I don’t want a vivisection, to get a bit of your attention.”
Which I thought was a great lyric! i was impressed. But apparently it’s:
“Objection, I don’t wanna be the exception, to get a bit of your attention.”
How dull.
That site’s definition is overly restrictive. Mondegreens can be taken from any kind of song.
Holly crap, I heard almost the exact same thing. Well, what I heard was 90th hour, but damn, kind of weird and yet refreshing that somebody else heard almost the same thing too.
That was Keith Urban?! Another reason to hate him. I accidentally heard that song one day and had it stuck in my head for hours.
I thought we had this thread before? I could have sworn I’ve posted this here before. Anyway, my favorite mishears are Aerosmith’s “Lovin an Alligator”, a line in that Shania Twain song “Damn, I feel like a woman” that sounds to me like she’s saying “give 'em a labia” and another country song by Martina McBride(?) “This One’s for the Squirrels”.
I don’t like country but my favorite radio station started sneaking in these “crossover” country songs, I found a new radio station… but I still sing “This One’s for the Squirrels.”
Delerium’s Daylight is written as
You don’t have to be my Heaven, I won’t have to be your friend.
but I always hear it as
You don’t have to be my Heaven, I won’t have to be your sin.
I like my version much better.
An oldie used to drive me crazy every time it played on the radio. I knew I was hearing it wrong, because the words I was hearing were ridiculous. I couldn’t ask anyone else, because apparently the words I was hearing were so far off the mark, they had no idea what song I was talking about. So it became a kind of quest. every time the song popped up on the radio, I turned up the volume and listened very, very closely, sure that this time I would understand what the singer was actually singing.
And every single time, this is what I heard: “There’s a can of fishhhh…all over the world…tonight.”
At least ten years went by before I finally figured out, “There’s a kind of hush…”