Mondegreens

My kids love listening to music. They love to sing! And the funny thing is, when they sing, they do it with all their hearts, belting out the words as though they understand the emotion behind every lyric. Even when they don't quite get the meaning or the lyrics right... The other day the kids wanted to listen to one of my 80's collections, and in the middle of Bonnie Tyler's heart-wrenching ballad, Total Eclipse of the Heart, my three-year-old asks me, "Mommy, how can a girl that's all grown up fall apart?" While trying to explain what that meant to her, I was transported back to my childhood, and my understanding of some of my favorite songs at the time.

"I'm not Lisa. My name is Julie. Lisa left you years ago. My eyes are not blue, but mine won't leave you..." Okay, so obviously this song was about a blind man, and for years nobody bothered to tell the poor guy that his old girlfriend had left and he had a new girlfriend who didn't have blue eyes - right?

Oh, and how about that good old Steve Miller song, "Bingo Jet had a light on"? Who knew that there was a whole jet made for playing bingo on? Awesome!

And poor Kenny Rogers and his 400 children. What was Lucille thinking?

And not quite a misunderstanding of the lyrics, but just simply having no idea what this song was about... I can remember walking in circles around a pole at Kmart singing repeatedly, "That't the way, uh huh uh huh, I like it, uh huh uh huh,"while my mom was in the check out line.  She was mortified and begged me to stop singing that song. I really didn't understand why.

Of course it was always curious to me how Dire Straits got their "Money for nothing and your checks for free" in a time long before free checking came about.

I never did understand what the lyrics to this oldie meant, "Bob bob bob, bob bob a ran..." Why was Bob running, and did he have a stutter?

Then there were a couple of songs that my sister and I intentionally changed the words to because we thought it was funny. One of my favorites was the Copacabana... You remember it, "Her name was Julie, she was a floozy..." (Keep in mind, this was long before I really even knew what a floozy was, and I just thought it was funny because it made my sister mad!) The other one I cannot repeat in it's entirety because no matter how I try to spin it as an adult, it will never seem as innocent as it actually was when sung by 5 and 8 year old girls... But it was an Abba song, and it started with, "The wiener takes it all..."

I think my favorite one though, is one that my oldest child sang at the tops of his lungs while listening to the radio in the van one day a few years ago. You have probably heard the song, Breathe, by Anna Nalick.  Only, his version of the lyrics are what you might call a Freudian slip? Because according to his young mind, the chorus of the song was, "Pray, just pray..." I loved this "misunderstanding", because from the mouth of my babe, I was reminded that no matter what is going on, there is one simple thing that I can do that will help me through any situation. And still to this day, when I hear this song, I smile when I think of my little boy's sage advice.

"Pray without ceasing..." I Thessalonians 5:17