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Mishearing as a creative act
"I like turning on two radios at the same time and listening to them. I like hearing things incorrectly. I think that's how I get a lot of ideas is by mishearing something."
For years I have held the strong belief that you should never look up the lyrics to your favorite songs because the lyrics you think you hear are usually better than the official ones.
You can imagine how delighted I was to learn that Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, felt the same way, and wrote about it in the foreword to the band's complete lyrics:
I've generally found that the words to songs I thought I heard in the works of others were more colorful and enigmatically apt than the words I eventually discovered were intended. More to my personal taste. I assume the same is true of my own work. Mishearing can be as much a strength as a liability. People, accidentally overhearing their own thoughts, are inclined to like what they hear, self-recognized at a distance and mistaken for another.
"Back in the day," he said, he didn't allow his lyrics to be printed so that listeners "could dub in their own mishearings, adding a bit of themselves to the song."
Misheard lyrics, by the way, have a name: Mondegreens. Here's Maria Konnikova on the science behind them in The New Yorker:
"Mondegreen" means a misheard word or phrase that makes sense in your head, but is, in fact, entirely incorrect… Hearing is a two-step process. First, there is the auditory perception itself: the physics of sound waves making their way through your ear and into the auditory cortex of your brain. And then there is the meaning-making: the part where your brain takes the noise and imbues it with significance. That was a car alarm. That's a bird. Mondegreens occur when, somewhere between the sound and the meaning, communication breaks down. You hear the same acoustic information as everyone else, but your brain doesn't interpret it the same way.
Mondegreens are an act of creativity — our brain is creating something that isn't actually there.
I remember Lynda Barry standing in front of an audience and singing the The Young Rascals' "Groovin'." Here is how she told the story elsewhere:
There is a lyric I understood as "That would be ecstasy, you and me and Leslie, just groovin'"
I loved this idea of me and one of the Young Rascals and someone named Leslie groovin' together in that bird singing place. I didn't know who Leslie was, I didn't know who the Young Rascals were, I just knew where ever they were was where I wanted to be.
When was in my mid 20's I heard the song again, and the lyrics were actually
"Life would be ecstasy, you and me endlessly groovin'"
And it was such a disappointment. Because Leslie was gone. And 'endlessly' groovin' didn't sound like anything. It sounded like an idea of something maybe, but nothing specific. Nothing as personal. And nothing that felt like a place.
It may make more sense– but it wasn't alive in the way 'Leslie' made it alive.
'Leslie' didn't make any sense, it's nowhere else in the song, but it anchored it for me because it was specific rather than general.
That's what I was trying to say. That it's a specific image vs. a general image that tends to be more alive. And useful. And able to take you somewhere.
That idea, that mishearing can take you somewhere, is so powerful. As Tom Waits says in the quote above, he actively courts mishearing, cultivates the "weird ear," because the mishearing is the beginning of new sounds.
In this epic New Yorker profile of Bruce Springsteen, E Street guitarist Steven Van Zandt remembers recognizing Springsteen's "drive to create original work":
In those days, he said, you were judged by how well you could copy songs off the radio and play them, chord for chord, note for note: "Bruce was never good at it. He had a weird ear. He would hear different chords, but he could never hear the right chords. When you have that ability or inability, you immediately become more original."
There are several examples of songs that were born because of creative mishearing. Stevie Nicks wrote "Edge of Seventeen" after Tom Petty's wife Jane started telling her how they met:
"She was telling me about Tom [Petty], about when she met him, and she has an incredible Southern accent…and she said that she met him at the age of seventeen, but I thought she said "edge", and she said "no…age" and I said "Jane, forget it, it's got to be "edge". The "Edge of Seventeen" is perfect. I'm going to write a song, ok? And I'm going to give you credit." She didn't believe me, you know? She couldn't believe it when it came out on the album."
And at least one mondegreen changed the world: Bob Dylan thought the Beatles were singing "I get high!" in "I Want To Hold Your Hand," so he got them stoned for the first time!
See also: Re-imagining from memory
Midnight plane to Houston
Jim Weatherly with Gladys Knight & the Pips in 1973
Here is one of my favorite examples in pop music of how a pretty decent song can be made into an absolute classic.
In 1970, a songwriter named Jim Weatherly called his buddy on the phone. He wasn't home, but his girlfriend, this woman named Farrah Fawcett, answered the phone. Weatherly chatted with her a bit and Fawcett said she was packing for a "midnight plane to Houston." He thought that sounded like a good title for a song, and wrote and recorded this:
Now, no offense to Jim Weatherly, but this track makes me want to slit my wrists. The bones are there, but it's just not quite right. (As an aside, that line, "I'd rather live in her world than live without her in mine"? Dang.)
Well, Cissy Houston (Whitney's mom!) heard something in it, even though when she went to record her version in 1973, she had to make a few changes.
"My people are originally from Georgia," she said later, "and they didn't take planes to Houston or anywhere else. They took trains."
She asked permission from Weatherly and he said, "Change anything but the writer and publisher."
Now we're getting somewhere! Note how better it is with the gender switched and Houston's pipes. (That moanful harmonica is a bit much for me.)
Weatherly's publisher then sent Gladys Knight and The Pips the track. And with producer Tony Camillo, they turned it into the classic it is today:
That arrangement! The subtle lyric switches. ("Proved too much for the man.") Those horns! That muffled snare way up in the mix. The backing vocals! So good.
Here they are doing it on Soul Train. (I love how Gladys laughs right after she lays it down so hard.)
And here's them on Midnight Special doin' it sitting down:
The song was such a gigantic hit and the band got so big, they became the joke of a skit on The Richard Pryor Show:
And here's a Doonesbury from 1974 sending them up (my father-in-law gave me this clipping years ago):
You can always turn around
About a dozen years ago, new to Texas, I lied down on a floor in a room with busted air conditioning and listened to this Bill Callahan song (about moving to Texas) and it felt like heaven. (From his wonderful album, A River Ain't Too Much To Love.) The song begins:
I did not become someone different
I did not want to be
but I'm new here
will you show me around?
This song — and this album, for that matter — like all great art, gets deeper and deeper for me over the years. Its lyrics are simple, but they are true, and all of the lines, like children, are my favorites, but today my most favorite line is refrain:
No matter how far
wrong you've gone
And later in the song:
and you may come full circle
and be new here… again.
Just a remarkable piece of music. A song that I would love to have played at my funeral.
Here is Gil-Scott Heron's cover, from his last album, I'm New Here: