Sing it, baby...

You know you’ve totally done it. You have sung the wrong lyrics to a song. And I’m not talking about just forgetting the words momentarily. I’m referring to that embarrassing situation in which you’ve misunderstood what the lyrics said in the first place, and then you proceed to belt out the completely wrong phrase every time you hear the song on the radio. That is, until someone is ‘kind’ enough to say… “Omigod… THAT’S what you think they’re saying?”

When everyone was buying CD’s it was less of a problem. Those handy dandy lyric sheets that came in the packaging of most CD’s gave us the ability to ‘decode’ those pesky verses, and we could avoid the embarrassment of singing… “Like a virgin, touched for the thirty-first time.”

But now that we’re downloading music off of the internet, there is just that much more of a chance that embarrassing lyrical slip-ups will occur. I know I’ve mangled more than one Alanis Morissette song in my day. In my defense, she can be a little difficult to understand in her ‘angry’ songs…which is really… um… ALL of her songs.

And what’s even worse than someone pointing out to you that you’re singing the wrong lyrics? When you try to convince them that YOU are right, and then discover that you were, in fact, sadly deluded and incorrect. It used to be that you would call a half dozen people to get their opinion. Now you can just Google the lyrics and eat crow. I thought for the longest time that the B-52’s were shouting “HEN---RY! BUSTED!” Guess I thought that poor Henry got busted hanging out in the Love Shack (… baby.) Made a lot more sense to me than the tin roof thing.

Which brings me to my favorite John Mayer song, “Say”. I love this song. It’s my theme song, if ever there was a theme song for a girl that really doesn’t have too much problem saying what she ‘needs’ to say… or wants to say… or shouldn’t say, for that matter. If you haven’t heard it, you should definitely check it out on Youtube, or this next part isn’t going to make any sense to you at all.

I usually have music playing in the kitchen while I’m cooking dinner, and the kids are working on their homework (what an idyllic little scene I just created in your head… trust me, it’s not all that.) The kids like to sing along to the songs they know or have heard dozens of times (when they’re not requesting to hear the Vacation Bible School CD… yet again…God bless ‘em) and a couple of days ago, I overhead them singing along to the chorus of “Say”.

“Sandwich, you need to say… sandwich, you need to say… sandwich, you need to…”

Hmmm…guess it’s genetic.