Damn, I liked it too.
Staying with Bowie, for a long time I thought “I’ll stick with you, baby, for a thousand years” (Golden Years) was “I’ll sleep with you, baby, for a thousand years,” and “for fear your grace should fall” (Let’s Dance) was for Fear in gray chiffon." Why Fear would wear gray chiffon I can’t say, but now I always picture her so attired.
“Scuse me, while I kiss this guy”, sounded better to me than “Scuse me, while I kiss the sky”, especially coming after the words, “Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why…”
Q
Flintstones Theme:
“Let’s ride, with the family down the street.
Through the, courtesy of friends you’ll meet” (Meaning the sponsors)
Years later, I found out it was “through the courtesy of Fred’s two feet.”
Which is why I laughed my ass off when I read a recent post by Tuckerfan, when he explained he had to do a “Fred Flintstone” to stop his car!
That *still *makes me laugh, Tuck!
Q
Another Sting one, from “If I built this fortress”
Then let me build a bridge
For I cannot fill the chasm
With nothing 'cept the battlements on high
The last line is actually “and let me set the battlements on fire” but I like the image of pulling down the wall to fill the chasm with…and then finding out it isn’t enough.
Simon and Garfunkel
A frosty room, in a cold and dark December
I am alone
Looking out my window, to the street below
A silent shroud of freshly powdered snow
The last line is actually “On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow” …but mine has internal rhyming too, and I like it much better.
Now the big one - see if you can guess what this song is
We live, underneath the river
We dance underneath the falls
When you live underneath the river
There’s no way that you’re ever gonna get dry
I had vague recollections of that too, with the rescuer (Sugar Bear) being either Long John Baldry or perhaps Bernie Taupin himself, so I Googled it, and it looks like the correct answer is Long John Baldry.
I submit two.
From Janis Joplin’s Me and Bobby McGee (and yes I know that it was written by Kris Kristofferson) has the lyric: *“And I’s feeling nearly as faded as my jeans.” *I argued with my sister that the words were: “With my spirit nearly faded as my jeans.” We looked it up online and in a genuinely rare occurrence, she was actually right but we both agreed that “my spirit” was a hell of a lot better than “my jeans”. Oh well, what are you going to do.
From a relatively obscure Steely Dan track, West of Hollywood from the seemingly almost as obscure Two Against Nature, a fellow Danophile wrote that he heard the lyric *“It started out good; Then it got less better,” *which was a considerable improvement over the actual pedestrian lyrics of “It started out and good and it got lots better.”
From Macy Gray’s I Try…
What she sings: “My world crumbles when you are not near.”
What I hear: “I blow bubbles when you are not near.”
Silly, silly…
I once embarrassed myself by asking why Eric Clapton named the song Layla when Layla is never mentioned. That’s because every time he sang Layla I heard “hey girl”.
My only excuse is that I was hearing the song through the speakers at a table in a diner. If you remember those it’s surprising I could even tell what song it was, let alone understand the lyrics.
The Nick Cave song “The Mercy Seat”, about a convict on Death Row being strapped into the electric chair, has the lines:
“Into the mercy seat I climb
My head is shaved, my head is wired
And like a moth that tries
To enter the bright eye
I go shuffling out of life”
I always heard it, with one vital word changed, as:
*Into the mercy seat I climb
My head is shaved, my head is wired
And like a monk that tries
To enter the bright eye
I go shuffling out of life
*"
I still prefer my version. Comparing a fatal fascination to a moth being drawn to the light? That’s one of the oldest cliches there is. But a monk? Well, that cleverly refers to the convict’s just-shaved head, it continues the religious themes from elsewhere in the song and interestingly juxtaposes the image of a monk kneeling down to pray and seek peace with God with a convict doing the same thing on the electric chair. I can’t believe how much better my version is to that of Mr Cave.
Porcupine Tree - Lightbulb Sun
Steven Wilson paints a vivid and touching picture of a sick child who hears his friends playing outside while he is confined to his bed: “The sun is a lightbulb, the candle’s a tree*, and the curtains stay closed now, on my little retreat… but after a while, the noise from the street, is making me wish I was back on my feet.”
*) The actual lyrics say treat, not tree, but this is the way I heard it and actually prefer it.
I always thought it was “And there’s a road in the distance, love,” which makes sense.
Morrissey had it in *Ask *as “A buck-tooth girl from Luxembourg”, I prefer “A buck-tooth girl who looks sunburnt”
Yep, that’s the way I heard it.
In “What A Wonderful World”, I still think “dog’s say goodnight” is much more fitting with the title, than “dark sacred night”.
Dark sacred nights are a dime a dozen, but talking dogs would be awesome.
This one got me too. I always heard “modern-storic” for the same reason.
In Jesus & Mama by Confederate Railroad I had thought for years it was:
“Life’s a picture that you paint,
With blues and grays and cans and can’ts”
I thought that was great. Life is made up of what you think can and can’t be done.
Then I finally saw the words in print and it was “blues and grays and cans of canvas?” What?? That makes a lot less sense than my version.
Prior to the internet and Steely Dan’s website, I used to think that their lyric in Hey Nineteen was “…make tonight a wonderful dream”.
Instead it’s “Make tonight a wonderful thing”.
I like my version better.
(Though in terms of musical ability, and with theirs being at roughly 96 or 97 out of a hundred and mine being around 2, I doubt that I’d ever voice that opinion to their face.)
There’s a line in the musical about Joseph’s brothers:
Yoiu make a sordid group
I always heard:
You naked sordid group.
Similarly I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do by ABBA:
No hard feelings between you and me
If we can’t make it
was heard as:
No hard feelings between you and me
If we get naked.
I like “I’m a bisexual innuendo in this burned out paradise” better than “I’m a sexual innuendo…” from the Guns N Roses song “Rocket Queen.”
Anything you made up for Alan Parsons Project’s “Games People Play” would be better than the “real” lyrics. I mean:
WTF?
It makes as much sense as:
*We dance underneath the radar
We live underneath the bomb
When you live underneath the radar
Theres no way that youre ever gonna get far
(so get hip!)
*
Or maybe, we’re just too small to make a fuss about it.
Mine is from The Swish by The Hold Steady. The actual version goes:
They made a movie about me and you
They made it half nude and half true.
but I hear the second line as:
They made it half good and half true.