songs

Each Christmas we listened to 'Carols by Candlelight'. My father always expressed amazement at how great a composer 'Candlelight' was. For years I believed that every Christmas carol was written by the same person - it did eventually dawn on me that candlelight referred to the candles everyone held while singing.

Debbie, Australia

my dad played the guitar and although some of the songs were his own, i thought any song he played and sang that i hadn't heard before was his. sometimes it wasn't until years later when i'd hear a song on the radio and recognize it that i'd realize my dad hadn't made up that one, too.

minmin

Im 13 and I believed up until a few days ago that the USA's National Athem was a Christmas Carol! I found out because we were talking about what Christmas Carols we thought were kinda strange and random, and I started singing it and my friend burst into hysterics and told me that it was the USA's national athem!

Charlotte

I was about 10 when I heard the song "Squeezebox" by The Who. I asked my older brother what the lyrics meant, "Momma's got a squeeze box she wears on her chest and when Daddy come home he never get no rest, 'cause she's playing all night, and the music's all right - Mama's got a squeeze box, Daddy never sleeps at night," etc. He told me it was about an accordion. I believed him until I was in college.

Joy

i used to think all songs were exactly one minute long, and it wasn't until i was nine that i realized that wasn't true.

Brigid Foley

This isn't a misheard lyric. I heard the right words, but I didn't know what they meant. The Christmas song "Silent Night" contains the lyrics "All is calm, all is bright / 'Round yon virgin mother and child". Everything is calm and bright 'round (around) them.

I heard "'round yon virgin" and imagined that she was round because she was pregnant.

Brenda

I used to believe that I was the only person in the entire world who knew about my favorite ratio station.

Gillian

My Dad told my sister and I that he made up the jingle for Pepsodent toothpaste....."You'll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent." We believed it for years and so did all our friends.

Vicki

When I was a kid I was a big fan of the Rolling Stones. I thought the song Mother's Little Helper was about a kid that helped his Mom. I always told my Mom I was her little helper, and of course they didn't tell me the true meaning of the song. It wasn't until I was in High School that I figured it out.

Sean

When I was growing up we never played rock and roll in the house, only classical music. The first time I ever heard rock and roll I couldn't make out the words clearly, and I thought the singer was singing nonsense words. I concluded that rock and roll was ALWAYS nonsense words, and I believed that for a long time..

Mordecai

I used to think that music was recorded by many, many tape recorders when the artists were playing their songs. If it was a really popular album, the artist had to do this over and over again because there were not as many tape recorders as tapes.

B

When people talked about dentist's office music, I heard it as "Dennis Stoffers music." I thought that Dennis Stoffers was a musician who made very boring music that nobody liked.

John

I remember walking to school singing The Doors song "Light my Fire." I thought it was about a guy who went camping, forgot matches, and was singing to a female camper who was walking by....you know, "Come on baby light my fire..."

I could see him on his knees next to his camp fire, pleading for matches "Try to set the night on fire...!"

mojo

When the Cindy Laupher song She Bop came out when I was seven years old I thought it was about dancing. As I heard pop songs from the 50's and 60's in which the word "bop" was used for dancing for a long time I had just thought the song was about getting in trouble for dancing ( sort of like in the Footloose movie). It wasn't until I was nineteen I discovered from an older friend what She Bop actually meant, and I blushed so many shades of red. LOL.

Bambi

I used to have a tape that I played over and over until everybody was sick of it. It was one of those silly song tapeswith goofy kids songs. There was a song that mentioned several types of food and had something that rhymed with it. It was crazy. One of the verses went like this:
Oh it's meat, meat, meat that knocks you of your feet.
So one day after playing that tape, we were having dinner. I was scared to death to take a bite of the meat. We were sitting in the floor around a coffee table in front of the TV, and I thought if I ate the meat, I would be lifted through the air and thrown to the other side of the room. My mom got so agravated trying to get me to understand that the people on the tape were not serious. I didn't like meat anyway, so when this happened, she thought it was because of the tape.

keyboardplayer

For a long time I thought that Elton John was a former member of the band, The Rolling Stones. That belief came from his song "Philadelphia Freedom", whose first line is "I used to be a rolling stone."

Tiffany

When I was around seven years old, Queen came out with "Bohemian Rhapsody." I figured out that it was about a murderer condemned to die. I asked my mother how they would kill him. She told me that they would put him in a large box and close the lid, and he would proceed to suffocate and die. To this day, when I hear the gong struck at the end of the song, I picture two flaps closing on a really big cardboard box.

Wendy

I believed that all songs just existed. I never imagined anyone could write one even though I knew about writing poetry. "New" songs (hits) were just songs someone had found and decided to sing and make popular.

Theresa

When I first heard as a child the song, "What Child Is This?", with its line "Whom angels greet with anthems sweet", I thought that anthems were some kind of flowers.

Heather

In one part of the sound of music where the captain plays the guitar and sings edelweiss, i thought he was saying anal wipes

Anon