Staff Picks: 8 Mondegreens You Can’t Unhear

Ever been driving down the highway when a song you kinda-sorta know comes on and you start belting it out, only to realize you have no idea what the words are? Or maybe you’ve been singing a line wrong to your favorite song all these years. Whatever the case may be, even the most hardcore music fans have had close encounters with “mondegreens,” defined simply as a misheard lyric. Here are seven of our choice mondegreens. No psychoanalysis, please!

1) “Hey there, amigo” (“Brown Eyed Girl,” Van Morrison [1967])

Original lyric: “Hey, where did we go?”

Picked by: Andrea

This actually isn’t one of my own.  As an avid listener of this song for my entire life, I’ve always known the original lyrics.  In fact, as a child, I even thought this song was written about me (brown eyes, I lived in “the hollow” near a creek – which is close enough to a waterfall).  However, my fiance recently told me that only until he was an adult did he realize that the song does not start out with Van addressing his beloved “amigo.”  If it did it would of course be an incorrect adjective conjugation since the song is about a female – a Brown Eyed Amiga.  Either way, now whenever I listen to this song I can’t unhear this mondegreen.

2) “She’s an easy llama” (“Easy Lover,” Philip Bailey and Phil Collins [1984])

Original lyric: “She’s an easy lover”

Picked by: David

This is how powerful a mondegreen this is: it’s a mishearing of the song’s title from within the very first lyrics, but that doesn’t stop me from hearing it. I can look directly at the title of the song while listening to it and still hear Collins and Bailey say “easy llama.” Thanks to the McGurk effect, I hear it even when I see them sing it. I’m starting to suspect it’s what they actually sang, and they named it “Easy Lover” to throw us of the trail.

3) “Stick out your poo-say” (“The Oogum Boogum Song,” Brenton Wood [1967])

Original lyric: “Check out the boots, hey”

Picked by: Rick

This was a tough call for me because I’ve interviewed a couple of artists whose recordings contained well-known mondegreens — so I’m going to cheat and list two! The first is from Brenton Wood’s 1967 hit “The Oogum Boogum Song.” Wood told me that the song “was a sign of the times; miniskirts and bellbottom pants were all the new fashions of the sixties and that’s what the song references.” But one of those references has confused a lot of listeners. Wood sings about a girl, and says “When you wear those big earrings/Long hair, and things/You got style, girl, that sure is wild/And you wear that cute trench coat/And you’re standin’ and posin’/You got soul, you got too much soul.” Then – at about the 2:12 mark in the clip above – he appears to sing “stick out your poo-say” or “check out the poo-say” – at least that’s what many listeners swear they hear. “No,” Wood told me. “It’s ‘Check out the boots, hey!’ in keeping with the topic of 60s style.” But one does wonder if it were a bit intentional – it has brought the song a lot of attention over the years.

4) “I just want to fuck her, yeah” (“One of a Kind Love Affair,” The Spinners [1973])

Original lyric: “Makes you want to love her/you just got to hug her, yeah”

Picked by: Rick

My second selection was certainly not intentional on the part of the group, however, and in fact the late Bobbie Smith, lead singer of the Spinners on a number of their hits such as “I’ll Be Around” and “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love,” was pretty annoyed about their mondegreen because it actually forced them to re-record part of one of their songs. On 1973’s “One of a Kind Love Affair,” near the end (at about 2:37 in the video above) there’s a line that says “Makes you want to love her/You just got to hug her, yeah….” As Smith told me, “Well, some disc jockey broadcast that the line said ‘I just want to f**k her,’ so we had to go back into the studio and clean up that one line even though that’s not what it said at all. When we were coming up, you did everything you could to protect your career, because one scandal could end it all. So we didn’t think anything about being told to do it—we just went in and cleaned it up. If a disc jockey said he thought it said that, we wanted to clear it up for everybody.” This is probably one of the rare cases where a mondegreen actually caused a song to be partially re-recorded, as the lines above were excised from the new ending.

5) “Revved up like a douche…” (“Blinded By the Light,” Manfred Mann’s Earth Band [1976])

Original lyric: “Revved up like a deuce…”

Picked by: Jim

It’s probably low-hanging fruit, citing this one, but there’s an even better reason to paint a target on Mann’s mumbles here:  Once you hear the original by Bruce Springsteen, and come to appreciate how much more intricate this is compared to the cover, then throwing the word “douche” at Manfred Mann becomes second nature as a result…

6) “Don’t bring me down…Bruce” (“Don’t Bring Me Down,” ELO [1979])

Original lyric: “Don’t bring me down…’grooos'”

Picked by: Erika

Midway through the song, it sounds like Jeff Lynne’s really bummed out by some dude called “Bruce,” and everyone wondered who this guy was. Lynne explained how the mondegreen came to be: “I was putting a lead vocal onto the song and there was a gap, and I just sang ‘Groose.’ I was doing it just to fill a hole up, I wasn’t gonna use it. Then the engineer, Mack, who is German, suddenly got on the talkback and said, ‘How did you know that word?’ And I said, ‘What word?’ And he said, ‘Groose. It means ‘Greetings’ in German.’ I said, ‘F**king hell, I never knew that….Let’s leave it in, then, it sounds all right.'” The mondegreen was so pervasive that ELO gave in and started singing “Bruce” whenever they played it live (see above), and they still do to this day!

7) “Give me the Beach Boys and free my soul” (“Drift Away,” Dobie Gray [1973])

Original lyric: “Give me the beat boys and free my soul”

Picked by: Allison

Though not as uncommon as one might think, this is a mondegreen that spent an embarrassing amount of time plaguing young Allison. In fact, I loved the Beach Boys so much in my very early teenage years that I would sing this at the top of my lungs and, at one point, I quoted it on a listserv (yes, my interneting goes back to those mortifying days of endless listserv emails and Hotmail accounts) as a favorite lyric, and some older music fan very quickly shut me down with the correct lyric. I was heartbroken. But I’m happy to report that I’ve recovered from the crushing blow and now only sometimes belt out the wrong words when I’m blasting Dobie Gray’s only Top 10 hit.

8) “Someday monkey won’t play piano song…” (“Michelle,” The Beatles [1965])

Picked by: Lindsay

This one involves a bit of bilingual confusion, but as a Canadian with French-speaking Quebecois grandparents (and owing to the fact that the lyrics literally gave the English translation of the French line right there in the song) I feel like I should have known better. Plus it’s just stupid — I mean, really, what was I thinking? It wasn’t until I was in grade seven and taking my first formal junior high French language classes that I realized I was wrong. But it wasn’t until a few years later when I looked up the lyrics online and discovered just how wrong I actually was. So while I think there’s some level of surreal Lennon-esque absurdity to my mondegreenization of this lyric, I fully accept the ridicule that has been foisted on me through the years for this one.