Misheard Song Lyrics

I named a character after misheard lyrics from Nightwish's Amaranth: Caress the one, the never-fading Raney Noirhart, with tears of snow-white sorrow.

She translates pop music into the Black Speech, and tries to teach her pet spiders to weave heart-shaped webs. She is The Perkiest Goth in The World.

I hear Megadeth's Rust in Peace...Polaris, and every time Dave sings "Rotten egg air of death," I keep hearing "Rotten n*gger of death," which half-amusingly makes him look like a closet racist (admittedly, considering the things I've read about him recently, he not-so-amusingly might be).

My favorite mondegreen is from "Maneater" by Hall & Oates:

"Whoa oh, here she comes / She's an anteater"

A deliberate one I came up with to amuse myself while hearing the same handful of top 40 songs over and over again at work, in this case "Can't Hold Us" by Macklemore: "So we put our hands up like the ceiling cat told us".

Dammit, that's even better then my "ceiling fan".

First time I heard "Popular" from Wicked, I misheard a word in the line, "it's the way you're viewed" as "it's the way you're nude".

From Pompeii:

What was sung: "How am I going to be an optimist about this?"

What I heard: "Now I'm going to be an optimist about this."

I heard the same thing as you for that song.

Hey, at least you don't have to be an alchemist about it.

"Cut mouth bleeding razors / Spaghetti the pain" for "Cut mouth bleeding razors / Forgetting the pain" in The Black Angel's Death Song

It all comes across as a word salad to me anyway, so I prefer spaghetti the pain.

Rush: “Limelight”

Actual lyric: “Living in a fisheye lens...”

...but I keep hearing: “Living in the Fish Islands...”

edited 1st Oct '14 4:55:44 PM by Bananaquit

When I used to listen to E.T by Katy Perry, I used to always hear "It's Supernatural, it's treacherous trio!" but it was actually "It's supernatural, extraterrestrial."

edited 4th Oct '14 8:12:01 PM by Ms.Reverie

My big mondegreen from that song is "Getting stupid-ass straight about The JoJ." (Even more amusingly, another YouTube Pooper pointed that out before cs188 himself did.)

edited 5th Oct '14 12:11:01 AM by Twentington

I just remembered I used to think the lyrics for "Fly like an Eagle" by the Steve Miller Band went: "Feed the babies who don't have enough to eat. Shoot the children with no shoes on their feet. Hows the people living in the streets?"

The real lyrics are: "Feed the babies who don't have enough to eat. Shoe the children with no shoes on their feet. House the people living in the streets."

I've never heard "shoe" used as a verb before. Then again, Steve Miller generally seemed fond of using (no pun intended) Lyrical Shoehorn.

Back when I was young I misheard and I swear into and I'm Sue, which means I'm unlucky in Hokkien dialect.

Did you know it was possible to mishear the lyrics to "Turn Down For What"? I heard "five to now" as "fire a round".

Opeth's "Bleak." I hear "I am dying fast inside your tears" as "I am dying fast inside your penis" for some reason.

x 4: I looked it up on dictionary.com, and that is apparently a valid definition for "shoe" ("to provide or fit with a shoe or shoes"). I had heard it used as a verb before, but only in the sense of shoeing a horse - putting horseshoes on poor, shoeless children is kind of a terrifying mental image.

Another deliberate mondegreen born out of having the mix station on at work all day, from Avril Lavigne's "Complicated": "promise me I'm never gonna find you naked" (instead of "...find you fake it").

U2's "Beautiful Day": "Sky's full of felines / It's a beautiful day". It's actually "Sky falls, you feel like / It's a beautiful day". But I like the idea of Bono happily looking up at a sky full of flying cats. Although maybe he should be more concerned.

edited 16th Nov '14 10:17:27 PM by MikeK

I really painful mondegreen for Manilla Road's song The Riddle Master that really takes me out of the moment for an otherwise amazing track.

Where he says, "What lies in dark dungeons of holy men's fears," it sounds to me like he says, "What lies in dark dungeons of holy men's beards."

In the song Alone Again Or, it's actually "And I will be alone again tonight, my dear", not "And I will be alone again tonight with you".

Taylor Swift's "Blank Space": "Go to lonely Starbucks lovers, they'll tell you I'm insane". When in fact it's a long list of ex-lovers, not a bunch of lonesome caffeine addicts, who will tell you Taylor is insane.

I keep hearing a certain line from Fixer Upper wrong:
What I Hear: "His isolation is confirmation of his desperation for human hugs!"
Actual Line: "His isolation is confirmation of his desperation for healing hugs!"

Sorry, Olaf