You and me/I in song lyrics

Cafe Society
1

Inspired by this thread (Lyrics that give you pause… In a bad way.) wherein cmkeller suggested that these two songwriters should get together and swap pronouns:

Originally Posted by Life is a Highway by Rascal Flatts *
There is a distance between you and I…

Originally Posted by Bad Romance by Lady Gaga
You and me could write a bad romance…

Also palindromemordnilap mentioned The BoDeans’ Good Things: “I can see good things for you and I”
Do songwriters ever get it right? The first to come to mind (for some reason) is The Jackson 5: “I’ll Be There”

You and I must make a pact, we must bring salvation back
Where there is love, I’ll be there

Let’s do a tally!

So far the count is
Got it: 1/4
Didn’t: 3/4

  • originally by Tom Cochrane
2

Rick James got it right with “You and I”…

3

Robbie Krieger got it wrong in “Touch Me”:

“I’m gonna love you
'Til the stars fall from the sky
for you and I.”

However, it made for a good rhyme. That trumps grammar.

4

Eddie Rabbit got it right with “Just You and I”

Just you and I
Sharing our lives together.
And I know in time
We’ll share the dreams we treasure.

If only he could have done something about the whole sentence fragment thing.

5

Alice Cooper’s You and Me:

…but you and me ain’t movie stars
what we are is what we are
we share a bed some lovin’ and t.v. yeah.

6

Queen with ‘You and I’.

Can’t get much simpler than that.

7

But did they use the right pronoun?
The Moody Blues didn’t in “You and Me” (“You and me just cannot fail”).

8

I don’t usyally care if someone writes “you and I” instead of “you and me” or vice versa, because it reflects how people actually talk, but I don’t think Paula Cole has that excuse:

“So open up your morning light
And say a little prayer for I
You know that if we are to stay alive
And see the peace in every eye.”

What the fuck is that shit? How can so much awfulness be crammed into the first four lines of a song, and that song becomes a monster hit?

9

On the (tacit) assumption in this thread that the grammatical distribution of “you and I” should be the same as “I”, Eddie Rabbit did not get it right. To see this, consider which of the following sounds better:

“Just I … living my life alone”
“Just me … living my life alone”

10

Beatles: “You and I have memories, longer than the road that stretches out ahead”

Yes: *“And you and I climb, crossing the shapes of the morning
And you and I reach over the sun for the river
And you and I climb, clearer, towards the movement
And you and I called over valleys of endless seas” *

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and a dog named boo

12

So the count so far is
Got it right: 5/12
Nope: 7/12

I had to squint just right to get these two in the “got it” column:

Queen “You and I”
Music is playing in the darkness
And a lantern goes swinging by
Shadows flickering my heart’s jittering
Just you and I
Not tonight come tomorrow
When ev’rything’s sunny and bright (sunny and bright)
No no no come tomorrow 'cause then
We’ll be waiting for moonlight

and Eddie Rabbit “Just You and I”
Just you and I
Sharing our lives together.
And I know in time
We’ll share the dreams we treasure.

What makes these difficult is the potentially offending phrase is a sentence fragment. Take Queen’s lyric: If what was meant was “Shadows flickering, my heart’s jittering [at the thought of] just you and I…” then it’s in the “nope” column. But the phrase is saved by “Just you and I [are] sharing our lives together”.

Similarly Mr. Rabbit: It works if you read “[It is] just you and I [that are] sharing our lives together.”

Giving them the benefit of doubt, both make it in the “got it” tally.

“Me and You and a Dog named Boo”
Me and you and a dog named boo
Travellin’ and livin’ off the land
Me and you and a dog named boo
How I love being a free man

I stand to be corrected, but I listed this in the “nope” tally: “me and you and a dog named boo [are] travellin’…”

If I remember what my Grade 8 teacher told me, correctness is determined by whether the pronoun is a subject or an object. It’s a no-brainer with the pronoun “you” because the subject form and object form are both “you”. Easy-peasy. For first person singular, “I” is the subject form and “me” is the object.

I hit John.
John hit me back.

It sounds wrong when they’re mismatched.

Me hit John.
John hit I back.

The correct pronoun form is “object” when the pronoun is in a phrase that begins with a preposition (e.g. of, about, to, at, etc.) With this in mind the following are correct…

He was thinking of you and me.
The book was about you and me.

… and these are incorrect:

They shot at you and I.
She is going to run to you and I.

Part of the confusion is teachers often correct young students when they say “Me and Billy found a dead rat under Sally’s desk.” No, no, it’s “Billy and I found a dead rat…” “Me and Billy” is such a common error that the correction “Billy and I”, through repetition, sounds like some sort of law. That is consistent with the observation so far that none of these songs use “You and me” incorrectly (except Lady Gaga - read into that what you will).

Man, I hope my Grade 8 teacher is a Doper (are you there Mr. Hood)? I hope he’s proud. (and I hope Gaudere is NOT reading :slight_smile: doubtlessly I offended his law in this post)

ETA: Gaga and the dog named Boo… So much for that theory, eh?

13

“She’s got a love for me that’ll never die.
That’ll change if she ever finds out about you and I.”

  • “Run to You,” Bryan Adams
14

I love breaking grammar rules for artistic purposes, but this is one that bugs me any time I hear it.

Makes me feel like shouting “Get off my lawn!” but I don’t care. Most people don’t know how to use personal pronouns, and to me that’s different from knowing the rules and breaking them for a reason.

15

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy got it right with “You and Me and the Bottles Makes Three Tonight”:

“Man I know, I gotta go, it’s the same thing every time
But I don’t think another drink’s gonna make me lose my mind
So I think about my next drink
And it’s you and me and the bottle makes three tonight.”

ETA: Or actually, did they? Does this follow the same rule by which “Who is it / It’s me” is considered incorrect? (FWIW, I’ll argue to the ends of the Earth that this rule is nonsensical, but this thread assumes a prescriptivist stance, so correct away.)

16

For whatever other artistic sins one can level at Helen Reddy, she was right with “You and Me Against the World.”

17

The Wannadies get it right:

I’m not so sure about Pink Floyd though:

I’m thinking “wrong” at the moment but could be convinced otherwise.

And it’s a “wrong” for No Doubt (“Don’t Speak”) as well:

18

Tim Rice got it right in Chess with You and I.

However, in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the line “Joseph whom you thought was dead” make me wince.

19

How about a case in which “for you and I” is correct?

Since “for” is used as a conjunction (in the sense of “because”) in this instance rather than as a preposition, Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly have it right in “True Love”:

For you and I
Have a guardian angel

20

I suppose I would be remiss if I didn’t also point out that Tears for Fears chalked up a correct usage in “Secret World”:

“You and I have a secret world
and we can keep it unfurled
Pay no attention to the cradle or the grave”

On the “you and me” side of the fence, Mesh got it right in “Is It So Hard?”:

“Is it so hard for you and me?
We break their hearts, we clip their wings
and we say everything we tried to do is wrong”