What Kind of Prince?

    For some unknown reason, I had a Rod Stewart phase.  "Young Turks", "The Rhythm of My Heart", and "Forever Young" were some of my favorites.  "Maggie May" was not--is not--and never will be.  I don't know why--I have an irrational dislike of it for some reason.  Perhaps it is because I never think the guitar introduction (which I DO like) goes with the rest of the song.  But that's another story.

    "Forever Young" is a sweet song about wishing someone well and always remembering them.  According to Rod Stewart himself, it is a song about his children.  Very sweet.

    The confusion in my younger mind came in the second verse of the song where he sings this puzzling line:

    "Build a stairway to heaven where the princes are all fat and bald."

    What does that even mean?  Heaven is great because everyone is a prince and they have plenty to eat and they don't need to brush their hair?   Maybe it's a weird reference to Yul Brynner?

    Well.  Of course that isn't the line.  It is this:

    "Build a stairway to heaven with a prince or a vagabond."

    Honestly, I'm still not quite sure what that means.  Perhaps he's telling his children to be kind to all sorts of people whether of high or low estate.

    Well, at least vagabonds are sweeter than fat, bald princes. . .

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.