My boy and I were in the car when Pearl Jam’s Last Kiss came on:
I lifted her head, she looked at me and said …"
Whereupon my son said “Why would he lick her head?”
I would nominate “3 x 2 = 6” by Vanity 6. Someone with a better ear than mine might interpret Vanity’s undulating whispering/breathy vocals in various parts of the song. When I actually saw the lyrics, I had correctly understood less than half.
Are you living in the East?
Strolling away the time?
Are you gathering up the years?
Do you have a diamond mine?
- Every time you go away, you take a piece of meat with you*
My family loves to make fun of me for this one. It just doesn’t make any sense to a little kid that the girl would take “a piece of me” with her.
There’s always Bryan Adams’“Summer of '69” where I heard the lyrics as: I had my first real sex dream. Apparently he’s singing about a guitar…
Also, the Tuborg song, otherwise known as “Wake Me up Before You Go-go”. I still have a hard time hearing it as “Jitterbug”.
Oh man… i got a bunch of these
add me to the one-winged dove, first off
Meatloaf’s latest, Bat Out of Hell III
in The Monster Is Loose I could’ve sworn the lyric was
And I’m angry/
And I’m aging…
which though appropriate, seemed unlikely
on further review I decided
And I’m Angry/
And I’m Asian…
which made even LESS sense… Turns out he’s Angry, and RAGING…
In “Seize the Night”, I thought he recommended that you “set your flannel sheets on fire”… turns out you should “Set your fantasies on fire”
In “Alive”, you have to watch out for “The chicken on the farm that you can’t turn back”
(actually… the ticker on the bomb…that version was way better though, those chickens are nasty)
I swear, he annunciates worse than Nirvana…
Also in Linkin Park’s “Breaking the Habit” I coulda sworn the lyrics were
“I don’t want to be the one/who battles all his shoes”
but my friends insisted that
“I don’t want to be the one/who battles all the Jews”
…
turns out it was “who battles all issues”.
I had a friend who always sang “Honest I feel!” for “Our lips are sealed.” (Go-gos)
A high school friend’s mother was aghast that they would put filth like the Who’s “Eminenece Front” on the radio. She was very surprised to hear that the lyric and title was not, as she thought, “Get Her In the Butt.”
I had always heard “eminence funk” as “livin’ in funk” until I heard a DJ mention the name of it.
A local group was singing “Chris misses Minnesota”
I thought they were saying “Christmas is Minnesota”.
Say them both…they sound exactly the same 
I thought “Eminence Front” was “Livin’ Is Fun”.
A friend of mine swears to this day that Survivor’s theme from Rocky III is I Love the Tiger.
You’re putting me on.
OK this probably just shows my personality but in the Beatle song Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da
correct lyrics
Desmond takes a trolly to the jewlery store
buys a 20 karat golden ring
brings it back to Molly at the Marketplace
and as he gives it to her, she begins to sing.
I always thought the last line was
as he gives in to her, she begins to sing
I thought it was “livin’ in a box”.
One of my worst, definitely most long-standing…
“Flintstones. Meet the Flintsones. They’re a monostoic family.” You know, like from the Monostoic Age. What…there’s no such thing?
When I was a kid, I had a 45 called “Pan the Piper”. Even then I couldn’t make sense of the underlined lyrics:
I recently stumbled across an mp3 of the record. The underlined part was really “conceivably”. It’s unusual for such a long word to be on a kids’ record, and I’ll bet there was some discussion about that when the music was being written.
I’ve always heard this one as “There’s a bathroom on the right.”
Fogerty songs that line on Premonition.
I wonder how you knew that was going to happen?
As a kid, I misheard the lyrics to “Day-o” as “daylight, Kong Man, me wanna go home.”
Somehow, I got the idea that this meant that the “story” of the song was thus that some kind of evil ape-man (like King Kong, or Donkey Kong) was holding the protagonist (and co-workers, I’d assumed) captive on some kind of plantation, making them harvest bananas for him.
I think I kinda like my version better, truth be told.
“I LOVE”
I love coffee in a cup,
little fuzzy pups,
Burpin’ (Bourbon) in a glass
and grass
I was 5 when this came out, burpin’ made more sense.
If I may draw your attention to rathergood.com
There are a number of these down the right hand menu. My particular favourite is Destiny’s Child “I depend on meat!”
Be careful… There’s a lot of flash animation and music if your at work.