the virtue of mishearing lyircs
I often mishear lyrics and often like my misheard lyrics better than the original.
I often base sets of lyrics off of a single line that I get into my head. Put these things together and I can write lyrics based on a mistake.
The craziest thing is that my misheard lyrics are my invention; that is, I own them and use them however I want.
Examples:
“Have you ever been honest now?” (misheard from “have you ever been all messed up?” from the song “One with the Freaks” by the Notwist)
and the one that caused me to write this post:
“There’s always the East Coast” (misheard from “it’s [blah] [blah] East Coast” from some Archers of Loaf song). I don’t know. I like that line a lot.
January 4th, 2005 at 1:21 pm
For the longest time I thought Belle and Sebastian’s “The boy with the Arab Strap” was instead “The boy in the iron lung.” That’s rather a long leap, but I’m still not sure which one makes more sense.
January 4th, 2005 at 1:59 pm
which reminds me of another mod night song that I misheard: Gigantic by the Pixies. I always thought it was “Gigantic! gigantic! gigantic! I think I’m in love!” not “Gigantic. A big big love.”
January 5th, 2005 at 8:20 am
I had the same problem with ‘Gigantic’ during the Mod Nite days. When I was a kid, I was notoriously bad with Beatles songs: I thought ‘Dear Prudence’ was ‘Dear Brutus’, and heard ‘Oh Johnny’ instead of ‘Oh Darling’. Of course, had I actually looked at the titles of the songs, all would have been made clear to me, and I wouldn’t have been so confused as to why these dudes kept singing love songs to other dudes.
I have several good examples of the misheard lyrics that are better than the actual ones, but for the life of me I can’t think of any of them right now. I’ll post when I remember, though.