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"Heartbreaker, with your..." Oh, don't say it!

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The Beatles - I Saw Her Standing There Even The Beatles are capable of bumming me out. Take the line "I'll never dance with another." To me, Paul McCartney was saying, "I'll never dance with her mother," and I was like, "Sure. Paul doesn't want to dance with his girl's old lady. Sounds fair." Turns out this wasn't the case at all.

The Beatles - Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds My mother is a nurse, so when I heard John Lennon sing "the girl with colitis goes by," I asked her what this strange affliction was. She seemed a little baffled but gave me a textbook explanation. All for nothing, really - Lennon was referring to a girl with "kaleidoscope eyes." My mother probably couldn't have explained that one anyway.

Steppenwolf - Magic Carpet Ride "Last night I had a leg of lamb" sounded like a decent enough line about the past evening's menu. But the real lyric, "Last night I held Alladin's lamp," has nothing to do with food. Different meaning entirely.

Led Zeppelin - Stairway To Heaven "There's a wino down the road" is a short and gritty description of the town drunk. The real words, "And as we wind on down the road," are very nice, I guess, but they tell me nothing about the neighborhood and its inhabitants.

And lastly we have Billy Joel - You May Be Right Although I abhor the man's work with an almost unreasonable passion, I thought his line "You made the rice, I made the gravy, but it just may be the tuna fish you're lookin' for" was pretty inventive. The real words are so generic that they need no repeating here. Suffice to say that the Piano Man lamed out, as usual.

There are other examples - in fact, here's a rather comprehensive website that details other misheard song lyrics. Seems I'm not the only one who doesn't hear things as they are. As for me, I'm finished with reading lyrics sheets, and I don't associate with my know-it-all-friend either. I'm tired of having songs ruined by what the writers meant. I'll stick to the voices inside my head. Most of the time, they're vast improvements.

By Joe Bosso

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