What Happens When You Mess Up The Lyrics
A humorous stroll down memory lane.
Ever since I saw this prompt several days ago, I had been thinking about it because I couldn’t come up with an angle to use for it.
I didn’t want to choose any particular song and talk about its lyrics, though I can think of several of my favorites whose words have inspired or entertained me. Being MisterWeirdo, I wanted to go a different route.
Then magically, as it happens so often as if guided by some serendipitous source, a sentence in Amy Marley’s story about the prompt gave me the angle I was looking for.
“Sometimes I hear the true lyric and laugh at myself for singing the wrong one for so long.” ~ Amy Marley
I think we have all done that. For me, it was more of a challenge because I had not listened to songs in English before I came to the USA. On top of that, some of the accents made it more difficult to decipher the words.
For example, when I listened to John Denver’s beautiful song about sunshine, I disagreed that “Sunshine on the water looks so ugly,” and for the life of me, I couldn’t understand that even if he thought so, why would he want to sing about it? Until, of course, I read the lyrics. Lovely, not ugly.
And then, there was the Kenny Rogers song about a heart-broken farmer who was lamenting that his wife left him with four hungry children and a crop in the field. It wasn’t four hundred children as I thought. I assumed they must’ve been running an orphanage or something of the sort.
My friend Noor, aka Truenorth, still reminds me of that now and then and we laugh out loud. So there you have it, Amy, you’re not the only one.
Today’s SCBWI prompt was Song Lyrics. Thanks for the invitation to play along, Amy Marley.
And here is her hilarious story that solved my dilemma and presented me with a perspective I can use.
Saloni Joshi killed two birds with a stone. She wrote a poem using two prompts: Unwind, and Song Lyrics in A mesh of words.
Bob Jasper took Time to Unwind after paying a tribute to his dad for his service as we celebrate Memorial Day, here in the USA.
As always, thank you for reading and responding.
More about me:
Rasheed Hooda is a published author and a regular contributor to ILLUMINATION, a writers’ community on Medium where writers support each other.
He is a self-proclaimed weirdo who lives a Freedom Lifestyle and writes about related topics — Travel (a top writer), Personal Growth, Freedom, and entrepreneurship. (Get the Newsletter)
“You can let others tell you what it means to be successful, or you can decide it for yourself.”