Sing it, Ronnie

 I am a musical child of the 80s.  It is the soundtrack to my formative years.  Never mind that I currently listen to a 90s/2000s station in my car.  I'm emo and didn't know it, apparently.  Whatever that means.  

Anyway, most of my misunderheard lyrics tend to come from 80s songs.  For example, "Take Me Home Tonight" by Eddie Money (not to be confused with Eddie Rabbitt who loves a rainy night. . .if they got together would they love to take me home on a rainy night?  Ahem, I digress.).  The refrain of Eddie Money's song has these lines:

    "Take me home tonight / Listen, honey, just like mumble mumble" [emphasis mine]

All this time he was singing ". . .just like Ronnie sang"!!  Which leads to another question: Who is Ronnie?  Turns out, Ronnie is Ronnie Spector from the Ronettes, whose song "Be My Baby" is quoted in "Take Me Home Tonight."  In fact, the female vocalist who sings in Eddie Money's refrain is Ronnie Spector herself!  This song got her back into the music business.  Pretty cool.

Seeing as how I interpreted the mumbles as "just like running fast", I think getting a musical star back into the game is better than running fast.  So, be my little baby--just like Ronnie sang.

Pirates of the Caribbean Queen will marry you quick

    I don't know what was running through my young mind when I heard the radio.  Seriously.  As I have stated before, I thought "Little Red Corvette" was "Limited Collect".  Apparently I did not listen closely to the lyrics--for crying out loud, he talks about the car the whole song.  

    Then there was the Billy Ocean song "Caribbean Queen". I was still off on the lyrics; but then again, there is no indication of anything specifically Caribbean in the song except that she is the queen thereof.  It's a song about a girl, mostly I can only recall the whistle in the second verse.  Anyway, my immature ears never heard him sing "Caribbean queen; rather, I heard "Marry you quick."  Sure--those two phrases sound so alike.  

    I should have known that it was NOT "marry you quick" because that would be grammatically incorrect.  It should be "marry you quickly."  Then again, as my husband says whenever I verbally edit the grammar of a pop song, "it's poetic license."  [By the way--you and I is proper for nominative case; you and me for objective case.]

    So, in conclusion, maybe he wants to marry the Caribbean Queen quickly, maybe he doesn't, but at least I know for certain that they're sharing the same dream.  Dreams.  Something.

I was right--for once--sort of

Gather around, kids, and let the old lady tell you a story.  Once upon a time, if there were no liner notes--what's liner notes?  Okay, once upon a time we had to play our music on records--what's a record?  It's like a really big plastic CD.  Or we had to play our music on cassettes--what's a cassette?  Well it's a, uh. . .never mind.  Don't even ask me about 8 tracks.  Anyway, sometimes those records or cassettes came with the lyrics to the songs--if you were lucky.  If there were no liner notes or you just heard the song on the radio, you had to guess at the lyrics.  No, really!  There was no new-fangled intraweb or whatever to look up the song and its lyrics. We could only see the video on MTV, if we were lucky enough to have cable.  We also had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow.  Wait a minute--I grew up in California.  Okay, I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the fog.  Fine.  I had to walk to school.  Sometimes in the fog.  When my dinosaur didn't want to be ridden.
One song I heard on the radio was a little ditty about two kids named Billy and Patti enjoying life and running away together.  I sometimes got it mixed up with a little ditty about Jack and Diane.  Anyway.  For almost all my life I was certain the name of the song was "Young Hearts", based on the repeated line: "Young hearts, beat free tonight."  Turns out, the song is called "Young Turks."  Okay, look; I know I get lots of lyrics confused, but I had no idea he was saying "Young Turks, beat free tonight" (or is it "Young Turks, be free tonight"?).  So . . . I was correct.  He does say "Young hearts, beat free tonight."  I did get the lyrics right; just not the name of the song.
So, to recap: "Young Turks"= the song title; "Young hearts" = the lyrics  Billy and Patti NOT Jack and Diane.  The phrase "young Turks" does not show up in the song.  At all.
Huh? What's the name of my dinosaur?

The Glory Days of 1985

This is not a case of misunderheard lyrics.  I heard correctly.  I got it, but it's subtle.  Let me explain.
The song "1985" by Bowling for Soup is about a woman who is having a midlife crisis of sorts.  She had all sorts of plans for her life which never came to fruition.  She is living a normal, middle-class existence, but would rather be back in her younger years when she had all sorts of grandiose ideas of what she would do and how she would be famous. 
The song is full of references of what was popular in the 1980s, and the chorus lists popular singers from that era--the first singer listed being Bruce Springsteen.
In May of 1985 Bruce Springsteen released a single called "Glory Days".  This song talks about some people who sit and relive the "glory days" of their youth. The words of the chorus are as follows: "Glory days, well they'll pass you by
Glory days, in the wink of a young girl's eye
Glory days, glory days."
 So the song "1985" is about a woman thinking back to her glory days of 1985--the actual year the song "Glory Days" was released by Bruce Springsteen.
Coincidence?  I think not.
Well played.

It's Not Just Me

So I'm not the only one who misunderhears lyrics.  It's also not only older performers who garble them.
These days I have the advantage of being able to look up a song's lyrics online so that I can actually see my misunderhearing and mentally correct it before it becomes an errant earworm (a.k.a. cerebreoredundogram, a.k.a. song that gets stuck in your head). 
One song that I had to look up was "Feel It Still" by Portugal the Man.  I suspected the lyrics were "I'm a rebel just for kicks;" however, one day my younger daughter was singing along and sang something that was not quite correct, so I had to show her her error.  In fairness, my daughter is under the age of ten, so there's that.
Another song I had to look up was "Believer" by Imagine Dragons.  [At this point, I feel I must correct a prior statement.  I like many of Imagine Dragons' songs too.  I can add that to my list of bands.] In the song "Believer" coming right before the refrain is a one-syllable word.  My daughters and I both believed (see what I did there?) the word to be "rain."  
Alas, all three of us were wrong.  After I looked up the lyrics, I found that the word was "pain."
So it's not just me.  I feel the pain still.  (see what I did there?)

Kids Hear the Darndest Things

It's always interesting to hear a child's take on lyrics. My daughter was once singing what I thought was "Go Tell It on the Mountain," except she was singing "Go selling on the mountain."
In my case, I heard the lyrics to Prince (the artist formerly known as Prince?  the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince?) song "Little Red Corvette" wrongly when I was younger.  Many decades have passed, and I now know better, but there are times when I still have to remind myself that Prince is singing, "little red Corvette," NOT "limited collect".  I seriously have no idea from where that came.

Literary Reminders

I have to admit it: I like Nickelback--inasmuch as I like any band.  I'm more of a like-the-songs kind of person rather than the band.  The exceptions to that are Barenaked Ladies, The Kingston Trio, and Lost and Found.  Pretty much anything those three play are OK in my book.  Anyway. . .
The breakout song for Nickelback was the song "How You Remind Me."  It was written as a breakup song, but whatever. It has some pretty good lyrics: Only a Canadian band could rhyme "sorry" with "story".  It does have a few "what'd you say?" moments.  The beginning of lines don't always come out clearly, but what's a few first person subjective pronouns among friends?  And I was certain it was a sarcastic "yes" before the "no no".  Turns out it was a repeated "yet" from the line "Are we having fun yet".
That said, the biggest confusion on my part is where the lyrics have a literary allusion.
It must have been so bad
'Cause Little Women must have d**n near killed you.
It's kind of a low blow, when you think about it: it's as if they are saying "you're so sensitive you can't even handle reading Little Women".
It turns out that this time I'm mistaken. (See what I did there?)  It is not "Little Women"; the words are actually "living with him".  According to Louder, this line is a reference to living with the lead singer of the band.  Okay, that makes a little more sense.
So, are we having fun yet?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no--no.

Love is a Gamble

I may have come of age (that is to say, I graduated from high school) in the early '90s, but the soundtrack of my era was the '80s.  The radio stations that now play " '80s, '90s, and today" back then played music from the 1970s and 1980s.  Now when I listen to the '80s station on satellite radio, I realize how much of the music really infiltrated my younger years. 
I had to explain to my children the concept of 1980's power ballads after they observed me laughing through "Lost in the Woods" in the movie Frozen 2.  They couldn't understand just what was so funny.
One power ballad I recall listening to had one of those confused lyrics that a ten-year-old me pondered.  At the time I liked songs, not bands, per se; however, I liked Starship's three #1 songs: "We Built This City"; "Sara"; and "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now".  The song "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" often made me realize that lyrics aren't always what they sound like.
This song that was featured in the movie Mannequin (a rather strange movie that actually has a sequel!) begins with the line "Looking in your eyes I see a paradise". The way the singer pronounces the word "paradise" always made me think he was saying "pair a dice".  I knew there was no way he could look into a person's eyes and see dice (although it does give a hilarious meaning to "snake eyes". . .Voldemort, perhaps?  "Nothing's Going to Stop Us Now" the Death Eater version? Harry Potter and the Starship--Ahem, I digress. . .); therefore, the word had to be "paradise".
Little did I realize my mistaken lyrics would resurface.  Recently I have been reading books by author Francine Rivers, and her book Redeeming Love has a Gold Rush town in 1850s California named--you guessed it--"Pair-a-Dice"!  With the name of the town, it is a clear pun with so many men taking a gamble on finding paradise in gold, and finding a wilderness of lawlessness.  There is an actual city of Paradise, California, in the Gold Rush area.  The town was supposedly named after a saloon called "Pair o Dice", but there is little evidence for that.
I still listen to the " '80s, '90s, and today" radio stations, and I do like the music from the turn of the century as well as from my childhood. This gives me more opportunities to find more confusing lyrics.

Well, Kids, This is Where We Are

The Second Coming

By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre  

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst  

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

**There's not much more I can say at this point.**

Huh? What was that?

When I was a child, my siblings and I participated in our Sunday school's Christmas Eve program.  We had to memorize a line (Bible passage or other) and then recite it.  My father would always encourage us to e-nun-ci-ate.  He would say it slowly and distinctly to emphasize the point.
To this end, I adjure singers everywhere to enunciate and help prevent confusion.
One song I point out would be "Soak Up the Sun" by Sheryl Crow.  Where was her Communist friend hold meetings?  I assumed it was his office.  Turns out, not so much.

Darn it, Leroy!

Installment #2 of Misunderheard Lyrics:
I was intending to bring up my second new direction, but have decided to stick with my first.  I'm also hoping it will be trending.  As if. . .
My dad was big on "culturing up" his children.  By this, he meant playing a variety of his 45s.  Those are records, by the way--big pieces of plastic that contained music. ;-)  My sister and I would dance (okay, run in circles) around the living room to such classics and "Guitarzan" and "Time in a Bottle."  I knew of the Edmund Fitzgerald and its sinking before I was even familiar with Great Lakes ships.  
One song my dad liked to play was "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown."  I liked the part about Leroy having a razor in his shoe.  I couldn't figure out how the handle wouldn't stick out and why he didn't get cut, but whatever.  I also couldn't figure out how Leroy was from the south side of Chicago, but was "the baddest man in the whole downtown".  I mean, the south side wasn't downtown after all.  But we all know "the downtown ladies called him tree-top lover," so perhaps he just hung around downtown.
It wasn't until I was in 7th or 8th grade that I learned of my lyrical error.  My teacher was telling our class how the author of "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" never wanted his mother to hear the song because there was a bad word in it.  In my naivete, I tried my hardest to find out where exactly that bad word was.  I had been hearing the song for years, and there was no bad word in it, was there?
Finally, it was revealed to me that Leroy Brown was not "the baddest man in the whole downtown."  He was "the baddest man in the whole d**n town."  Now, in fairness, I at such a young age, was not exactly familiar with swear words, so my young mind obviously interpreted the lyrics with a word I did know.  
I have inherited my father's collections of 45s, along with the rest of his records.  I am in the process of "culturing up" my children.  I don't like to play them "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" too much: Not because of the word which I now know is not down; rather, my husband is always quick to point out the misguided error of my youth.

Around the World and Back Again--No, Just back again.

So here I am, back from a MAJOR hiatus.  Life got in the way of blogging, but now, as we speak, the whole world seems to have been sent to our rooms because somebody coughed.  
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to make light of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the need to quarantine.  It's just that if we don't laugh, we'll go crazy.
I have come back with a new outlook--no, not really--but have decided to blog in another direction.  More thoughtful and insightful.  Okay, not so much. 
One topic I have decided to cover insightfully is something near and dear to my heart.  Music.
So today, I am introducing Misunderheard Lyrics.
I shall begin with my earliest memory of a misunderstood lyric.
I remember singing the Star Spangled Banner with gusto as a child.  There was just one thing about it that confused me:  What the heck kind of light is donzerly?
Apparently I was thinking of Donner and Blitzen or something, but I definitely did not hear the words as "dawn's early".  
To this day, I have to mentally correct myself while singing the song and remember there is no donzerly light; just early morning.

So, there you have it: Lyric number one.
Tune (see what I did there?) in for more crazy lyrics and other profound thoughts.