stevesunusual…music and more

There is quite a trade in misheard lyrics and I don’t plan on making a habit of being part of it, although my old notebooks are full of lyric re-writes often based on initial hearings of Smiths’ and other songs. The Clash, when confronted about Joe Stummer’s enunciation, said that part of the fun was listening and the lyrics eventually clicking, and I agree. And sometimes it’s fun to run with the lyrical notions we’ve created when listening to songs.

Legendary Scottish band, the Trashcan Sinatras, have a song on what I’d call their best album, Weightlifting. It’s called “Leave Me Alone.” When I hear it, I think of the relationships that have ended that I still wish hadn’t ended. Those get fewer and far between as time passes, but there are still one or two or three I think about.

Here are the lyrics, as found online:

It’s beautiful how the singer accepts the situation and is resolute in their goodbye and doesn’t want the loved one to return or bother them with little friendly gestures anymore, even though there is a tinge of regret in the “you won’t talk to me.”

I had heard the first verse as this:

The hardest thing of all is to belong
The oddest thing of all is time
I’m not sad at all, I can see beyond
The hardest thing of all – goodbye

Similarly, the last verse as this:

Yeah, the hardest thing of all
The oddest thing of all
I’m not sad at all
Goodbye

So, rather than “this time,” I heard “is time,” giving a more philosophical tone to it all. “Time” is the odd thing instead of “I’m not sad at all” being the odd thing.

Sometimes I also heard “oldest thing of all is time”, adding more to that tone. Either way, my way of hearing gives the lyric a paraphrase something like, “It’s hard to belong, and time is odd (or old). But I’m not sad, and can now see beyond your goodbye into the timelessness of the universe. Nothing begins or ends, the past is not cordoned off from the present, and such notions. Despite the goodbye, I can live with it thanks to this perspective.”

The original lyric may carry a similar philosophical look, perhaps, with the singer not sad, seemingly for similar reasons as I just described. Or it may just be a more unthinking feeling of not being sad by the loss without any reasoning attached; they have moved on for whatever reason.

Maybe, probably, my mishearing doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, but as someone who used to trade in such writing, it sure is interesting (to me).