Rock the Casbah misheard as Rock the cash-bar. I thought it was a song about people drinking and being punished for drinking. In my defense, I was 4, and sadly I knew what a cash-bar was.
Billy Jean is not my lover
She’s just a girl that thinks that I am the one
But
The chair is not my size
My wife was singing “Hello darkness, smile friend” until she met me. When I heard it I was like, “can you sing that back for me one more time?”
I don’t know how long we laughed but it was equally funny the next day when we remembered it again.
Jeff Davis of Who’s Line is it Anyway has a story about a friend of his mishearing “reach down, ease the seat back” in Van Halen’s Panama as “reach down, ease the seed bag”, as in adjusting his nuts. Always cracks me up when I think of that or hear the song
When I was a kid I heard The Go-Go’s Our Lips Are Sealed as “Alex the seal”.
Doesn’t matter what they say
In the jealous games people play
Alex the seal
I thought it was about a sad bullied seal.
I thought the velvet underground “run run run” was
Run run run run run take your jacket too
Instead of “take a drag or two”
Good advice when it’s cold out!
Well I know how I’m singing this song from now on.
“Sharp dressed man” always heard it as “Shy best man” this may have had a minor counterproductive impact on my behavior when I was a teenager.
What you thought it was a song about being popular with bridesmaids?
No, my stupidity went further than that, “best man” was just “good guy”
Every woman loves a shard glass man
Not a mondegreen, but I like to sing it as “Shark dressed man.”
What have I become my Swedish friend?
FYi, these are called Mondegreens after a famous song that was mis-heard by pretty much everyone. I think it was Welsch.
Mine is England Dan and John Ford Coley’s I’d really love to see you tonight.
Thought he sang, “I’m not talkin bout my linen.”
Instead of, "I’m not talkin bout movin in "
Made up a whole story in my mind about how they met in a Laundromat.
Hendrix’s “Scuse me while I kiss this guy” is a pretty famous one
I’m not sure this song ever made it out of Canada, but Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm by Crash Test Dummies has a verse where a girl in school wouldn’t change with the other girls, and when they made her, she had, in what I thought the lyric was, “burn marks all over her body”. I assumed the song was about child abuse, and they were cigarette burns. The other verses are about a kid with a shock of white hair from “a car crash” and a kid who always has to come home right after school, so it kinda made sense in a consistent enough way…
Anyway, for basically my whole life I thought that’s what the song was about. Turns out the lyrics are “birth marks all over her body”, and the point of the song is more about kids being othered for things outside their control.
I still think I prefer my version…
Oh, it made it out of Canada!
Great song, it definitely had airplay in both Europe and the US.
Man, that was everywhere back in the MTV days!
Ever since I was a kid I thought in Bon Jovi’s “Dead or Alive” he sang “on a stale horse I ride”. I figured he had been riding his horse out in the desert a long time, it’s all tired, no water… yeah it’s a stale horse. My partner will never let me live it down.
Also my niece and nephew thought Lady Gaga sang “I don’t want to be French” instead of “I don’t want to be friends” in Bad Romance. It fit too, as she sings in French right before that.
I love the Rolling Stones, but no one can understand a word Mick sings. I have alternate lyrics for all my favorite Stones songs - Gimme Shelter, Jumping Jack Flash, Brown Sugar, Honky Tonk Women…
Dirty deeds done with sheeps. They’re dirty deeds and they’re done with sheeps.
I always thought it was Dirty Deeds and the Thunder Chief. Thought the guy repeating it was a Native American beating a drum.
It’s Dunder Chief.
To be fair, I think there is a parody version that has those lyrics.
To this day I hear “Diarrhea Jane” instead of “Diary of Jane”
Chevelle - self destructor
*Go fight yourself" I somehow heard “go bite your tongue” Which is a form of suicide requiring extreme will. It made sense that the person in the song is so dead set they’d rather die than fail/admit they are wrong.
If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get rid of my friends
Not that the real lyrics are much better. “Get with my friends” means different things to different people.
Ha! That came on in the supermarket the other day. Serendipitously I was in the herbs & spices aisle at the time!
