Say What?

Don’t you just love when you hear someone singing a song you love, and it all of a sudden occurs to you that the words you thought were the words, really aren’t?

I started thinking about this this morning while I was running.  The Killers song “Are We Human” came on the iPod.  There is a line in the song that goes ,“Are we human, or are we dancer”.

Huh?

Never mind that it is grammatically incorrect. It also makes absolutely no sense.   Dancer could be pluralized to make a tiny bit of sense.   But not a whole lot.   Or maybe I was hearing the words wrong altogether? 

There is plenty of precedent for that.  Me hearing a song and screwing up the word beyond belief, that is.   My husband almost ran off the road when we were dating when he heard me sing the Peter Gabriel  song “Jeux Sans Frontiers” as “She’s so salty love”.    I seriously had no idea they were singing in French.   Those words didn’t make any sense to me, but it kind of sounds like that’s what they are singing.  Kind of. 

And when you don’t understand the words, sometimes you just make up something so you can sing to it.  Know what I mean?

When my brother was in elementary school, he had an assignment to write down the words to his favorite song.  He was in love with the Kinks at the time.  We used to listen to their album on the record player until one of his friends sat on the needle and scratched the record beyond repair. 

Aaah, the record player.  If we had kept half the crap we had no idea would be “quaint” today, we would be raking it in on eBay right now.

In any case, my brother listened to his favorite song off that album, wrote down all the words and handed them in to his teacher.

That’s when my mother got a phone call from school.  His teacher was  “concerned” about the music Brendan was listening to and told my mother it was rather inappropriate for a 12-year-old.  My mother asked her to send the paper home so that she could talk to my brother about it.

He had picked the song “Art Lover”.   One of the lines is  “like a Degas ballerina”.  Except that he had heard, and written “like a naked ballerina”.

Hence the phone call.

That cracks me up almost as much as the time I looked over in church and heard Madeline belt out the Hosanna at the top of her lungs.  She was shouting “lasagna in the highest”.   I am quite sure God has a sense of humor about those kinds of things.  Her heart was truly in it,  and she was only 5 after all.

Do you have a favorite “misheard” song? Have you ever sung really loud, only to realize after the fact that you had absolutely no idea what the actual words to the song were?

Come on, share it with us.  Pretty please?? It will make us all feel better!