There have been a few times where I’ve been defeated at karaoke by songs that sounded like they’d be pretty straight-ahead but ended up being more difficult than I’d imagined. “The Tracks Of My Tears” (Smokey Robinson & The Miracles) and “You Make My Dreams” (Hall & Oates) are 2 that come immediately to mind. Actually, I bet since Smokey sings so smoothly and seemingly effortlessly, a lot of his songs are actually harder than they sound. Anybody else?
Black Sabbath’s Paranoid.
Counting Crows’ Mr. Jones. I’ve heard several people mangle it. I’ve mangled it.
“Mr. Jones” I can see, but “Paranoid” surprises me.
Me, too. Also “Drops of Jupiter” or “Meet Virginia” by Train. Not a huge fan of their music, but Pat Monohan is under-appreciated as a vocalist.
Todd Rundgren’s “Want of a Nail.”
About a year ago I went to a wedding pre party at a bar. I had the bride to be karoki “I Like Big Butts and I Cannot Lie”. Its long, the words are said fast, and it not just repeating some simple phrase over and over. Its my contender for hardest Karioki song.
Michael Martin Murphy’s Wildfire.
I recently took part in a tribute show to John Lennon, and my answer to this is, “A buttload of John Lennon songs.” I thought Lennon mostly sang pretty comfortably within my (admittedly not great) range, but every song we picked was just exhausting to sing – in his key and with the proper energy, anyway.
(If you’re curious, the hard ones were “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” “(Just Like) Starting Over,” “Isolation,” “Gimme Some Truth,” & “New York City.”, along some much easier songs like “Dr. Robert” and “Love.”)
Hey, Mr. Tamborine Man
Quite a few rap songs are like that. I tried the Beastie Boys, “What You Want” on Rock Band and that was much tougher than I thought.
I’ve sung Paradise By The Dashboard Lights enough times (karaoke) that I can do the male part, but my partner usually stumbles a bit.
I’m sure tons of people have tried to sing “Don’t Stop Believing” only to find they couldn’t hold the really long notes. Anytime I’ve heard it done on karaoke nights it gets butchered pretty badly.
???
Much confusion here. That was the first song I learned to play on guitar and I found it easy to sing and even easier to harmonize when I could get someone else to lead.
In fact, all of the classic Dylan songs are pretty easy to sing, modify, adjust rhythm, etc.
I think that’s why so much of his early catalog is covered by others. The songs are so pure and simple that you can take them and personalize them to your style or just fire them off like Dylan did.
Whoops - forgot to add mine.
Blue on Black - Written by Kenny Wayne Shepherd with Mark Selby, Tia Sillers and sung by Noah Hunt. There are a number of hard electric and soft acoustic versions floating around and I can sing along with them OK.
Acoustically the song is a simple repeating three chord rhythm but for the life of me I can’t get my guitar and voice in sync to do it.
Another is Everlast’s “Saving Grace” of which a portion of the song was used as an intro to the Holly Hunter TV series of the same name. Easy chord progression with a rhythm that I can’t match and I even have trouble singing along with the music. A Capella style I have no problem hitting the notes.
This is probably because the singer is too overcome by shame to sing properly.
A friend and I once tried to do Ike & Tina’s Proud Mary. He went first and sounded fine but left me waaaay out of my range. I sounded terrible. Totally not my fault since friend was no where near Ike’s baritone/bass.
[Nitpick]
The name of the song is “Baby Got Back.”
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I would also add “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” by REM.
And in this trend, One Week by Bare Naked Ladies.
I could probably do that one pretty well. Back in my Rocky Horror days, they would play Paradise By The Dashboard Lights before the movie, and I’d frequently pull a woman up from an aisle seat to lip-sync it with me.
Yeah, I just tried…the key change to the refrain is murder:
I’ve been wrong
I had plans so big
But the devil’s in the details
I left out one thing
No one to love me
No one to love me
No one to love
Even more impressive when you realize that the album was recorded live in the studio with a huge band, and the vocal were a single take.