Mondegreens

Mondegreens. We all have them, misheard song lyrics. Sometimes they make a song more interesting, sometimes they make the song so much more interesting I refuse to acknowledge the correct words.

A friend of mine says she used to think the Elvis Costello song "Oliver's Army" said "Oliver zombie's on their way" rather than, naturally, "Oliver's army". I like the idea of a zombie called Oliver, and naturally Oliver being a zombie would only be a "they" since they would be neither male or female.

For a long time, I thought Iggy Pop's Lust For Life featured the lines "Here comes Johnny in again, with his Luther Vandross and his fax machine...". It seemed logical to me, this "Johnny" the song talked about was clearly a 1980s yuppie. Unfortunately, the reality was a little different: "Here comes Johnny Yen again, with his liquor and drugs, he's a flesh machine".
Yes, alright, that would make more sense.

Many of us are already familiar with the Kate Bush song Wuthering Heights that seems to contain the line "You had distemper, like my jealous eel" (really "you had a temper, like my jealousy") -- although I have also read interpretations of the song that include lines like "It's me! I'm a tree!".

Raine Maida of Our Lady Peace has quite a unique sounding voice, but sometimes the accent can become a little inscrutable. In the song One Man Army, I always merrily sang along to the line "unbutton your soul, take off your clothes, show them your vicar" -- the offending word in question, naturally, being vigor. I thought it made sense, until Jon laughed and corrected me.

Today I got a message on Facebook from a friend, who wanted to inform me that contrary to what I was asking in my status, the David Bowie song Ziggy Starrdust does not include the line "making love with his eagle", but instead the important word was "ego". I have found on a brief search several instances of this same mishearing. Anyway, I would argue that Ziggy Stardust was an alien, and how could we possibly assume what is normal for us is the same for him? Maybe he had a pet eagle that he really, really loved....