Songs you totally thought were by somebody else

Once a friend played some piano music by Sergei Prokofiev that was highly percussive, and remarked: “It sounds like the ghost of Bartók took him over!” Béla Bartók being my favorite composer, I enjoyed that. I think it must have been Sarcasms. I know it wasn’t Visions Fugitives, because I’d already heard that. Besides, I remember Visions Fugitives as light skippy faerie music, as only Prokofiev could have written.

For longest time thought Badfinger’s “No Matter What” was Cheap Trick, especially when singing the title.

(referring to Three Dog Night’s “Old Fashioned Love Song”)
How?? There’s no female vocal.

When I recall only the tune and chords and rhythm, and forget the singing (I tend to listen for music theory rather than vocals), it sounds exactly like the sort of material the Carpenters would do.

That it does.

Jesus, you weren’t kidding. I own all the early Yes albums, and this hits the sweet spot. Weirdly, I’ve never heard of them.

:slight_smile: Ah, my work here is done.

My opinion of Starcastle: If early Yes and early Styx had a baby, it would have sounded like the first two Starcastle albums.

Not surprisingly, Styx and Starcastle did a lot of dates together, and not just because they were both Illinois bands.

After the band broke up, Starcastle’s drummer, Stephen Tassler, went to medical school, and one story I read said that he had an old promo picture of the band in the waiting room, and you guessed it - the band was recognized more than once.

There’s a Doper who saw Starcastle back in the day, opening for Boston but they were there for the opening act, along with about 14,000 drunk teenagers who were there to see Boston, who basically phoned it in. (I had the same experience at a Boston show in 1995.)

When I lived in St. Louis circa 1980, I saw Starcastle play at a bar in southern Illinois.

My grad school roommate bought Edie Brickell & New Bohemians’ Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars after I told him they performed The Sundays’ cover of “Wild Horses” used in a Budweiser commercial. Fortunately, he liked the album.

It’s harder for me to mess up these days with Shazam, streaming radio, and Radio (Broadcast) Data System. However, I did manage to assume Gary Clark Jr.'s “Bright Lights” was by the Black Keys for years. I was intrigued by the thought of the Black Keys having a Talib Kweli feature and wondered if it was a sign of a new direction for them. Nope!

“Shooting Rubberbands…” is a good album. Their follow-ups were a disappointment.

I thought the song “Help Me” was done by Fleetwood Mac, maybe. I would never have guessed it was done by the same person who performed “Both Sides Now”

For multiple songs, I’ve had Little River Band, Supertramp, and Alan Parsons Project confused with each other. As a kid, my mom played all three constantly, and they all blended together in my subconscious. Particularly “Games People Play”, which easily could have been indistinguishably performed by any of them.