songs

I used to believe that the song "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" by Elton John was actually performed by the group Kansas, because Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz was from Kansas. I was seven or so, and my mom loved the gorup Kansas, so I just assumed...

Maria

When I first heard the term "symphony orchestra", I thought it was "sympathy orchestra". So I envisioned that it was a kind of orchestra that played only at funerals or other events to console friends and relatives of someone deceased.

Shelly

i used to believe that all rock music had subliminal messaging and i was scared to ever start liking rock music....now thats all i listen to \m/

a person

I used to believe that records housed little people inside the grooves. Music was made when the needle hit them on the head and they made whatever noise was assigned to them.

Cyndi

In the song "Jingle Bells" I thought the lyric "one horse open sleigh" was "one horse soapin sleigh." For years I wondered what the heck a "soapin sleigh" was. I figured that maybe they added soap to the bottom of the sleigh to help it move along? I don't think I figured it out until I was in my late 20s.

Dave

I used to believe that songs didnt have lyrics, and singers were making just pointless meaningless melodic sounds.

Anon

When I was young I used to believe the Y.M.C.A. was some kind of weird hotel because they sang "It's fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.You can get yourself clean, you can have a good meal,
You can do whatever you feel..."
Why would you "stay" at a gym? You "go" to the gym and "stay" at a hotel.
And I didn't know the Y serves meals???

Anon

This isn't so much misheard as misunderstood. I thought the line "And hamsters turn on frequently" from Simon and Garfunkel's "At the Zoo" was talking about robotic hamsters that could turn on and off with a switch. My dad told me the song was about the Central Park Zoo in New York City and I always wanted to go to New York to see the hamsters turn on and off.

Niamh

When I was little I heard that one Christmas carroll with the phrase "Jack Frost nipping at your nose". I had the most horrible mental picture of an elf with jagged teeth ripping my nose off.

Amy X

I used to think that air guitar was a style of guitar playing in rock music.

Anon

I thought the orchestra and singers were little tiny people who could fit in the groves of a 78rpm recording. T'was a long, long time ago I admit.

Anon

When I was little, I had this superstition that if I said the word "die", I would die. So whenever I heard a song on the radio with 'The Word' in it, I would substitute a word that sounded the same (like cry or try)....my parents thought I was very odd...

Anon

When I was little we used to go to a diner after church every Sunday to have breakfast. Each table had a jukebox where you would put a quarter in and hear a few tunes. I was about 4 or 5 at the time, and used to wonder how the band knew to start playing the song I wanted after I put the quarter in. I figured the quarter must have traveled down a long tube into a back room in the restaurant where a monkey would catch the quarter and bring it to the band, and they would say "Thanks!" and start playing. The only thing I couldn't figure out was how the monkey was able to tell them to play "American Pie" by Don McLean and not one of the other hundred songs in the jukebox. Hmmmmmmmmm.....

Todd

As a school kid growing up in the U.S. I was always quite disturbed when we sang "My country 'tis of thee". The line "Land where my fathers died" really perplexed me because I and my classmates mostly had fathers who were still alive.

Marilyn

When I was little, my dad and I would watch Sesame Street together, and my dad would sing along to the songs. One day I asked him how come he knew the song, and he said he knew all of them - meaning he knew all the Sesame Street songs since we watched it so often. I, however, took that to mean that my dad knew every song ever made in the world. So I would ask him for lyrics to a song when I didn't know them, and my dad would go look them up if he didn't know them... So I decided that meant that he had a really big memory but it was too big to carry all of it around in his brain, so he would open his head and change the memory part of his brain.

Nemo

When I was small, I used to listen to my mum’s old Beatles vinyls a lot, and I thought she was so lucky to have obtained a copy of each record because I thought when recording them, the Beatles were playing their songs in a huge hall next to hundreds of record players turning and recording, so there’d be a lot of records but I figured that eventually those would be sold out anyway and you could not reproduce them.

justine

Before I knew inner monologues existed, I thought "getting a song stuck in your head" meant seeing the words in your head.

Anon

The song "America The Beautiful" with its last line "From sea to shining sea" had me perplexed for quite some time. I puzzled arduously over which, of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, was shining and which was not.

Marilyn

i used to think air guitar was the same as electric guitar, i just thought air guitar was ran by air.

Anon

When I was little, whenever I would listen to a radio, I thought that the band was playing the song live, from inside the radio.

ninja