Oh, so *that's* what they're singing!

[koeeoaddi]

Sister Goldenhair

“I’ve been won for Boris Karloff” *

oh …“I’ve been one poor correspondent.”* Nevermind.

[Szlater]

@Pushkin

I can’t remember the name of the song, or anything else other than the line that I now know to be “Al-bu-querque”, sung by a jovial woman.

I can’t locate the song from that alone, all I can tell you is that I thought it was nice that this woman wanted us to know that “I-like-cookie”

The King of Rock and Roll by Pre-Fab Sprout?

“Hot dog, jumping frog, Alberquerque.”
My “oh that’s what he’s singing” moment is “Bernie Goetz” from “We didn’t light the fire” by Billy Joel. For the longest time I thought he was singing “Burning kids”.

[Icarus]

Jessica Simpson - A Public Affair

All the camels come out for another buffet

(All the cameras come out for a public affair)

[Shoeless]

There’s a song on Richard Thompson’s “Mock Tudor” CD called “The Sights and Sounds of London Town.” The first line in the song is:

Jillian, she’s a Doncaster lass

But what I always hear is

Jelly and cheese, a Doncaster lass

[brewha]

@Inner Stickler

For the longest time I thought the last line of the Fall Out Boy song Sugar, We’re Going Down was, “A loaded gun complex; cock-eating bullet.” Not that old, I know but, hey.

And the only reason I know what Freddy Mercury was singing in Killer Queen was because I read the liner notes that came with the CD.

Man! You were way off! It’s:

" A loaded God complex, cock-eating bullet."

[WOOKINPANUB]

@hotflungwok

I took a while, but I finally found the lyrics to Yellow Ledbetter.

That’s comedy gold, Jerry!

Mine was mentioned in the American Idol thread. The line from Love the One You’re With is apparently “there’s a rose in a fisted glove” and not “there’s a road in the distance, love”. I did not know that!

And I can’t listen to the last line of ** Rock the Casbah** without hearing “from the mental retardated” which, of course is "fundamentally he can’t take it.

[Jenny_Haniver]

So does anyone else tend to like their own lyrics better than the real ones?

I sang this for an entire summer a couple years back:
"Shake it! S-s-sshakeit (oh-oh!)
Shake it like a bona-fide ninja

Heeeeeeeeey ya…"
Mine’s totally better. Polaroid picture? Feh.

[randwill]

On that new Foo Fighters song, the beginning of the chorus sounds, to me, like it starts, “One of these things is not like the other.” Which I’m sure isn’t right.

[Walkabout]

@Jenny Haniver

So does anyone else tend to like their own lyrics better than the real ones?

I sang this for an entire summer a couple years back:
"Shake it! S-s-sshakeit (oh-oh!)
Shake it like a bona-fide ninja

Heeeeeeeeey ya…"
Mine’s totally better. Polaroid picture? Feh.

There’s a Tracy Lawrence song that has the line “they just show on up with their big old heart”. I first heard it as “they just show on up with their pickle jar”, and I think I like that better.

[Marley23]

@fishbicycle

So I turned the internet virus shield on full and went to a lyric site. As it turns out, he is saying, “gunpowder gelatine,” but pronouncing it “gel-a-teen.”

Until I read this, I thought it was “tur-pen-teen.” I guess that’s not very dangerous, but it’d be poisonous if you drank it, so… well, anyway, thanks I guess.

@installLSC

For years, I though the Beatles were singing “such a feeling for you love/I get high” in “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. It seemed to me like a drug reference, very daring for 1964.

Supposedly, Bob Dylan made the same mistake when he met the band.

“Lightning Crashes” by Live has a first verse about childbirth. There was one line that always confused me. It seemed to say “the senses fall to the floor”, an utter throwaway line. I went to a local club where the song was covered on acoustic guitar. The line’s actually “the placenta falls to the floor”, which makes much more sense and makes the song better.

Interesting that somebody out there likes it - I always thought that was one of the most ugly and awkard lyrics I’d ever heard.

[ouryL]

My sister’s fav was “Secret Asian man”.

[yellowval]

@randwill

On that new Foo Fighters song, the beginning of the chorus sounds, to me, like it starts, “One of these things is not like the other.” Which I’m sure isn’t right.

Yep, and every time I hear it I forget that it’s actually “What if I said you’re not like the others” and it takes me half the song to figure it out again.

[Hampshire]

@Jenny Haniver

So does anyone else tend to like their own lyrics better than the real ones?

Yes.
On Moby’s song Signs of Love the first lines go:
If I was Beautiful
If I had the time

I originally heard them as:
Find what’s beautiful
Find the time

which I always thought were some good words of advice.

[Ludovic]

@Jenny Haniver

So does anyone else tend to like their own lyrics better than the real ones?

Yeah, such as in the rap in Groove is in the Heart when Q-Tip sings “Baby you’ll see the funk inside ‘a’ me.” I sing something … else.

[Missy2U]

@yellowval

Yep, and every time I hear it I forget that it’s actually “What if I said you’re not like the others” and it takes me half the song to figure it out again.

It isn’t. It’s “What if I say I’M not like the others”.

Here are the lyrics for The Pretender.

[maggenpye]

Tim Finn’s How’m I gonna sleep (without you)?

The song is a sad farewell to a woman who has left him and I could never work out why, in the middle of these sad, loving lyrics, he sang;

“This common laxative.”

It was actually, I found out twenty odd years later, “This comet lacks a tail.” I like mine better, break-ups give me the shits too.

[yellowval]

@Missy2U

It isn’t. It’s “What if I say I’M not like the others”.

Here are the lyrics for The Pretender.

Figures. I think I’ll stick with “One of these things is not like the others.” At least that lyric makes me smile.

[JKellyMap]

@installLSC

For years, I though the Beatles were singing “such a feeling for you love/I get high” in “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. It seemed to me like a drug reference, very daring for 1964. Actually turns out it’s “I can’t hide”–a much less cool lyric.

Bob Dylan thought the same thing when the song came out.

Similarly, I could swear that the Gyutu Monks are chanting “yeah, yeah, I’m high, I’m high, yeah, I’m high, yeah, yeah” for about half an hour on a CD of mine.

[Ichbin_Dubist]

@brujaja

Talon Karrde, I was a massive REM fan for their first three records or so. (After that, eeek!) And I love to sing along to music, but with them, all I could do most of the time was sing along phonetically. I still have no idea what most of those songs were about.

Eh, you just sing the vowels and ignore the consonants.

If you look on various lyrics websites for Murmur, there are some songs with completely different phonetic interpretations. Like these for the same line in “Sitting Still” (these are literally the first 2 Google results I got):

*Up to par and Katie bar the kitchen door, but not me in

Up to buy, Katie buys a kitchen-size, but not Mae Ann*

I sang along to the Pixies for years without really thinking about what the words were, like this from “Bone Machine”:

I make you break
You make me hard
Your Irish skin
Looks Mexican
Our love is rice and beans and horse’s lard

[Moirai]

'Scuse me while I kiss this guy…