singing bee

While tearing up at an old episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on CMT, I caught an ad for The Singing Bee that had nothing to do with Mario Lopez Joey Fatone and made an appeal to the viewer to preserve the integrity of song lyrics by watching and participating in the show. It got me thinking about lyrical slips I’ve heard friends make over the years and famously indistinct lyrics nobody seems to be able to decipher. How would they do “Yellow Ledbetter” on a show like that?

In the spirit of The Singing Bee’s message, here are a few songs with commonly misunderstood lyrics we’d like to see the world get right:

  • The aforementioned “Yellow Ledbetter,” by Pearl Jam. A friend of mine performed this song many years ago, and because she wasn’t able to find the lyrics anywhere, she made most of them up and mumbled through the rest. Nobody in the audience could tell.
  • Jimi Hendrix’s line “excuse me while I kiss the sky” in “Purple Haze” has actually inspired a Website of misheard lyrics called www.kissthisguy.com. Excuse me while I kiss this guy? Not what he’s saying after all.
  • Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” is a perennial favorite for dancing at weddings and road trip playlists, and the lyrics are pretty terrible once you understand them. It turns out that Debbie Harry isn’t saying “You’re cheezy like the devil,” she’s saying “you teasing like you do.” IN this case, they lyric is better that what I’d always heard, but I’ll never get used to “mucho mistrust.”
  • Have you ever read the lyrics in the album liner notes of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”? In particular, the lyrics to “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’”? Despite having happily sung along with the song forever, something changes when you see “ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa” typed out. (And now I just ruined it for you. Sorry!)
  • Finally (for this list) is Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Even when you do understand the lyrics to this classic, you don’t understand the lyrics. “A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido.” What??? Was Kurt Cobain really the voice of his generation? Let’s hope not.

What did we miss? Have you got a great story about misunderstanding lyrics or hearing someone else sing a song totally wrong? Share it with us!