I am the King, I wish for bacon!

Confession #3: I am a music geek. I love music. Now, I'm not geeky enough that I know everything about every genre and/or every artist. To be honest, I don't even really investigate too heavily into the artists I like...at least, not beyond their albums and tour dates. But when I like a song, I want to know the words to it. I can still remember (and this is where the embarassing part of the confession comes in) sitting up late one night with my friend Beth, listening to a tape of C&C Music Factory, learning the words to "Gonna Make You Sweat" (better know as the "Everybody Dance Now" song). We'd listen, rewind, listen, rewind, write down some lyrics, then repeat endlessly. Once we had all the lyrics written down, we listened to the song without stopping it and sang (or rapped, if you will) along.

That's right. I loved C&C Music Factory, and I'm not ashamed of it.

I'd like to take a moment here and acknowledge Laura, who was the first to bring this topic to light. I'm going to start where she started, and then take it to a broader scale.

So, sometimes I'm not lucky enough to own the song I want the lyrics to. Sadly, I'm often not lucky enough to even like the song I want to know the lyrics to, but it keeps getting stuck in my head from the radio and the only way to get it out is to sing it correctly; otherwise I'm walking around all day singing what I *know* to be the wrong words to the song, trying to figure out how to change the wrong words into something that makes sense. Example:

The Killers have a song called "Somebody Told Me." It's on my workout mix...I enjoy The Killers. Good tuneage. So here's what I heard when I was singing along (I have put line breaks where there are pauses in the songs):

Somebody told me
That you had a boyfriend
Who looked like a girlfriend
That I had in Bellvue
Heeeeeeeeeeey last year
It's not confidential
I've got potential

I even had a whole story worked out where Bellvue was a mental institution he was in. Turns out this is what they're saying:

Somebody told me
That you had a boyfriend
Who looked like a girlfriend
That I had in Febru-
Aaaary of last year....

And so on. In my defense, it's kinda not fair. They broke a word in the middle of a pause. In any case, there it is.

As I'm writing this, I'll have you know, that I'm at work in the ER, and the attending doctor pointed out to me that I can look up any lyrics I want on the internet. My response to this is: yes, I know, but the song is only in my head when I'm not near a computer, and when I'm near a computer the song is not in my head and so I don't think to look it up. But I mean, I was pretty set on the Bellvue thing - so how do you think I found out about February? =)

There's another song on the radio right now by Fallout Boy called "Sugar We're Goin' Down." My version of the chorus:

We're going downtown
And we're tooling around
And Sugar we're goin' down swingin...

The real version:

We're going down, down
In an earlier round
And Sugar we're goin' down swingin...

Ah, misheard lyrics. They're the best. I actually have a book called 'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy that has a list of misheard lyrics (the title being from the Jimmy Hendrix classic Purple Rain and the real lyrics being "Scuse me, while I kiss the sky").

Along with the misheard lyric theme comes a whole slew of song anomalies. For example, it was brought to my attention this holiday season that not everyone sings the classic "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" the same way. When I was younger, we would add in extra little "chants" at the end of each line, like this:

Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer (reindeer)
Had a very shiny nose (like a lightbulb)
And if you ever saw it (saw it)
You would even say it glows (like a light bulb)
All of the other reindeer (reindeer)
Used to laugh and call him names (like Pinocchio)
They never let poor Rudolph (Rudolph)
Join in any reindeer games (like Monopoly)
Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say (Ho, ho, ho)
Rudolph with your nose so bright
Won't you guide my sleigh tonight
Then how the reindeer loved him (loved him)
As they shouted out with glee (Yippee!)
Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer (reindeer)
You'll go down in his-tor-eeeeeeeee (like Columbus)

I know that the last line is often altered (like George Washington, like the Red Sox, etc), but as it turns out, some people don't add in the Pinnocchio, Monopoly, and Ho, ho, ho lines. Who knew?

In the same vein, I tend to make up words to songs that don't have words. I can't come up with an example right now, but some famous examples include Bill Murray's brilliant rendition of the Star Wars theme and different versions of Hail to the Chief (which, as I just found out, actually has words) in My Fellow Americans:

Hail to the chief, he's the chief and he needs hailing. He is the chief, so everybody hail like crazy.

and in Dave:

Hail to the chief he's the one we all say hail to...

These kinds of things never fail to crack me up.

Finally, when I'm in a really FANTASTIC mood and everything is fun to me, I make up a tune and the lyrics to it. It's hard to describe, but it's sort of like creating a soundtrack to what I'm doing at the time. So if I'm washing laundry I make up a laundry-washing song. Things like that. It gets rather silly, and it makes things even more fun. =)

So there's my menagerie of thoughts on my music geekiness. And now you have something to entertain you at work (Emily) or home (Mom and Dad) for a while. I'll work on something new to post sometime soon, and if it ever slows down at work (upstairs), then I'll put it up here. In the meantime, HAPPY NEW YEAR! =)