POP CULTURE

8 Amusing Misheard Song Lyrics

Surely the words don’t really say that, do they?

Have you ever believed a song lyric was one thing but found out it was something entirely different?

Have you ever wondered how a song lyric could be so rude only to find it was your naughty mind and not what the singer was actually singing?

Here are 8 misheard song lyrics from popular rock and pop songs.

1 Band On The Run by Paul McCartney

This song is about escaping to freedom as the title implies. I wrote about this in more detail in another article, Band On The Run.

The first lines describe the metaphoric prison the band are in:

Stuck inside these four walls, sent inside forever

This seemed straightforward enough until Paul Thomas Zenki pointed out on my Band On The Run article, he used to sing:

Stuck inside these four walls, circumcised forever

As Paul commented, it still makes sense although the meaning is somewhat different. No wonder the band were running.

The trouble is, this is all I can hear now when I play the song. I bet you will too.

2 Beast Of Burden by The Rolling Stones

I guess when you’re making a classic album you get carried away. You forget to eat. You forget you’ve left something in the oven.

Why else would Mick Jagger sing the following instead of the actual title?

I’ll never leave your pizza burning

3 Land Of Hope And Dreams by Bruce Springsteen

This song first popped up in 2001 on the Boss’s Live In New York album.

Most of the other songs on the album are, of course, well known so no one bothered to look at the track listings. Why would you? The River, Born To Run and Prove It All Night are all probably recognised by most sentient beings in the Western World.

With Springsteen’s penchant for deep lyrics about working people’s struggles, when an unknown song appeared on this live album, we naturally assumed the hook was:

Meet Me In A Land Of Broken Dreams

The real lyrics are classic Springsteen about a man offering his partner the possibility of leaving the darkness and sorrow for a Land Of Hope And Dreams. A very different thing.

Springsteen eventually released a studio version on his Wrecking Ball album 11 years later. We finally bothered to look at the title. Oh.

I think he missed a trick, Land Of Broken Dreams sounds much deeper.

4 Ticket To Ride by The Beatles

Ticket To Ride was a typical multiple-meaning title by the Fabs. It has the straightforward meaning of having a ticket to ride on a train or bus.

But the title actually came from a trip Lennon and McCartney made to one of Macca’s family living on The Isle of Wight in the English Channel, two and a half miles off England’s south coast.

The ferry from the mainland goes into the town of Ryde, and the Beatles loved the wordplay, Ticket To Ryde/Ride.

But there was more wordplay. They had used the expression back in their Hamburg days for the health certification paper the prostitutes carried — A Ticket To Ride with ride being slang for having sex.

Enter Mr Zenki to add a fourth but misheard meaning to the song title. His friend used to sing:

She’s got a tick in her eye and she don’t care

This works perfectly well too. And it has the added benefit of not having a smutty meaning.

5 Livin’ On A Prayer by Bon Jovi

Wow, all that hair and teeth. Hairspray product sales must have plummeted and hairdressing perm specialists put out of work in the New Jersey area when they got their hair trimmed in the 2000s.

I think NJ teeth whitening and enamel overlay orthodontist services are still going strong.

But did they really make that cheeky comment about being naked or not in the chorus?

It doesn’t make a difference if we’re naked or not

The official lyrics say something different:

It doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not

I’m not convinced.

6 Dancing Queen by Abba

I know Abba could be cheesy but there’s no need for violence.

You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life Ooh, see that girl, watch that scene Kicking the dancing queen

Let’s face it, kicking makes far more sense than, “digging the dancing queen.”

7 Like A Virgin — Madonna

Madonna’s Like A Virgin has deliberately ambiguous lyrics. The title even says Like A Virgin as opposed to actually being one. Madonna’s assertive style cemented that message.

This is why we all believed the lyrics to be:

Like A Virgin, touched for the thirty-first time

What a disappointment to learn that the real lyrics were, “touched for the very first time. Nowhere near as good. Or as funny.

8 Town Called Malice by The Jam

Like Bruce Springsteen, Paul Weller’s lyrics often contain working-class social commentary. The title, A Town Called Malice, is a wordplay on the book A Town Called Alice by Neville Shute.

The lyrics describe the despair of living in a rundown town with no opportunities somewhere in England. However, Weller deviates from the social desolation he paints on the second verse to have entirely different thoughts:

Rows and rows of disused MILFs stand down in the dairy yard.

The printed lyrics replace MILFs with milk floats (electric milk delivery vehicles used in the UK) but I don’t hear that. All I can hear is MILFs.

And 2 bonus lyrics you thought were misheard but were, in fact, deliberate.

One Vision by Queen

Instead of, “Gimme, gimme, gimme One Vision” it seems Freddie Mercury is singing:

Just gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme fried chicken.

He was. Mercury sang it as a joke. Maybe he was hungry like The Stones?

Girl by the Beatles

In typical Beatles style, they played with double meanings on Girl. Lennon’s heavy breathing on the chorus mimics an intimate sexual moment with the girl of the song. It also mimics a deep breath on a marijuana joint.

They also sang a backing vocal to the middle-8 section that was not what they told George Martin they were singing

“It was always amusing to see if we could get a naughty word on the record: ‘fish and finger pie’ (Penny Lane) and ‘prick teaser’ (Day Tripper).

We told George it was ‘dit dit dit dit’, but we decided to change it to ‘tit tit tit tit’. It gave us a laugh.”

Paul McCartney in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles.

Listen to the backing vocals behind, “She’s the kind of girl who…” Those cheeky Fabs.

Misheard Lyrics

What are your favourite misheard lyrics — deliberate or not?

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Here’s an article analysing a classic rock song