[QUOTE=Justin Credible]
Gina works a diner all day?
[/QUOTE]
See, now ya done gone and made me look it up, because I knew this wasn’t it but didn’t know what it was. 
The line is apparently “Gina dreams of running away”. Still sounds like “cheater trees” to me.
From Macy Gray’s “I Try”
I know she says, “My world crumbles when you are not near.”
But I thought for so long it was, “I blow bubbles when you are not near” that I can’t help but sing it that way.
These sorts of misheard lyrics are popularly referred to as “mondegreens,” I believe.
Were it not for discussions such as these, I would have gone to my grave thinking that the Young Rascals were singing, “Life would be ecstasy; you and me and Leslie.”
I’d envision a Summer of Love couple with the long hair and love beads and dungarees, lying on a grassy hillside somewhere, passionately embracing, and then my point of view would shift slightly to one side, revealing Leslie Nielsen lying next to them.
I still have no clear idea what John Fogerty is gargling about through most of Down On The Corner. “Willy picks a tuna and he blows it on a hump?” “Loose kid forms a duck face and solos for a while?” “Poor boy twines a rythym hound on his kalamazoo?” I’m pretty sure the acts he’s describing here are still illegal in most Southern states.
[QUOTE=Terrifel]
I still have no clear idea what John Fogerty is gargling about through most of Down On The Corner. “Willy picks a tuna and he blows it on a hump?” “Loose kid forms a duck face and solos for a while?” “Poor boy twines a rythym hound on his kalamazoo?” I’m pretty sure the acts he’s describing here are still illegal in most Southern states.
[/QUOTE]
Maybe he’s breaking the law, but I laughed. Bravo!
Loose kid is in the previous verse actually I think.
“Loose kid hid the why code, People just got to smile
Blinky frumps the duck face, and solos for a while”
For my wife it was Jungle Love by The Steve Miller Band
She always thought they were saying ‘chug-a-lug you’re driving me crazy’ 
I still laugh when I think about her singing it wrong all these years, and we joke about it even now. I mean the words are right there in the title!
I’ve had the unusal experience of having long thought I was mishearing some lyrics. In the Doors’ “Alabama Song” I always thought the last line of the chorus sounded like “and must have whisky, oh, you know why”. But I thought it was a clumsy line so I figured I was misunderstanding it and it was something else. However, when I finally looked it up I found that it was in fact what I thought it was.
[QUOTE=Hakuna Matata]
For my wife it was Jungle Love by The Steve Miller Band
She always thought they were saying ‘chug-a-lug you’re driving me crazy’ 
I still laugh when I think about her singing it wrong all these years, and we joke about it even now. I mean the words are right there in the title!
[/QUOTE]
heh [Steve Miller]
You treat me like I was your ocean,
you swim in my butt when its warm…
[Steve Miller]
Turns out its “blood” not “butt”
And speaking of CCR, I was always intrigued by this lyric from
proud Mary:
Cleaned a lot of plates in Memphis,
humped a lot of things down in New Orleans
I have yet to convince a friend of mine that Survivor’s theme from Rocky III is not I Love the Tiger.
At the very least, it’s a good idea to double-check the lyrics to songs that you yourself are planning on performing. An acquaintance of mine shared an anecdote of how his blues cover band once attempted to honor a request for Lloyd Price’s famous “Stagger Lee,” only to discover while playing that the lead singer thought the song told the story of a fellow named “Stagger Leaves.” He said this made for a rather awkward performance.
[QUOTE=Terrifel]
At the very least, it’s a good idea to double-check the lyrics to songs that you yourself are planning on performing.
[/QUOTE]
I just saw Across the Universe and was really irritated by the performance of “Something,” in which the Jude character sang the last line of each verse as “You know I believe in how.” (Should be “and how.”) You what? You believe in the concept of “how,” maybe?
My husband: “She’s got electric boobs, I know her do…”
Elton John: “She’s got electric boots, a mohair suit…”
My sister: “Baldheaded woman…”
The Bee Gees: “More than a woman…”
Me: “Rocket man, burning all the trees up on the lawn.”
Elton John: “Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone.”
I always thought one of the closing lines in Rickie Lee Jones “Atlas’ Marker” was “ooh, my sister buried him so deep, I hear her digging in her sleep”. I thought the imagery was really cool. The lyric’s actually “my sister’s buried here so deep. I hear her digging in her sleep”.
I just found out last year that Pearl’s Jam song “Jeremy” does not go:
Jeremy’s smo-king graaaass t’daaaayy
(it really goes: Jeremy spoke in claaaass t’daaaayy)
. . .Dammit Vedder, would it kill you sing clearer?
I have always heard Dusty Springfield’s venerable “I Only Want To Be With You” as saying “I fell into your broken arms” instead of "“open arms”
[QUOTE=SlickRoenick]
I just found out last year that Pearl’s Jam song “Jeremy” does not go:
Jeremy’s smo-king graaaass t’daaaayy
(it really goes: Jeremy spoke in claaaass t’daaaayy)
. . .Dammit Vedder, would it kill you sing clearer?
[/QUOTE]
There’s a part that I thought went
“Clearly I remember picking on the boy
Seemed a harmless little fun”
But it’s actually “a harmless little fuck.” That seems more awkward to me.
Just the other day Don Geronimo informed me that The Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” ends with he repeated lyric “had it all ,” not “get it on.”
Oh, geez, I have no idea what a large number of the words to “Long Cool Woman” are. That guy had a really strange idea of how to pronouce words that were ostensibly written in the English language!
Back in my misbegotten youth, when I first heard ‘The Animal Song’ by Savage Garden, off the soundtrack of ‘The Other Sister’, I was totally convinced that they were singing:
“I want to live, live cannonballs / Careless and free, live cannonballs”
It doesn’t help that the song actually references cannonballs later on, but this definitely made my scratch my head. He wants to live, but there are live cannonballs? And who’s careless and free? The cannonballs? Him? Hmmmm…
Then, sadly, I figured out that they were singing “like animals”. Totally altered the song.