Songs where the songwriter confuses A with B

The space he invades is clearly a reference to the popular arcade video game "Space Invaders."

However I suspect Peart was actually thinking of Frogger.

It doesn't make tons of sense, just sounds sorta cool.

Very willing to let this be the final word on this subject!

In "Durham Town (The Leavin')" Roger Whittaker, when singing of the river whose banks he used to sit on as a boy, confuses the Tyne with the river that Durham actually stands on, the Wear.

In "Lee Remick" by the Go-Betweens, Robert Forster confuses Ireland, where he claims the eponymous heroine comes from, with the USA, where she actually came from.

Xpost I remember someone writing into Points of view about that one, after Roger Whittaker had performed it on Top of the Pops. In 1968.

To be fair, in the song he sits on the banks of the Tyne watching the ships leaving. He doesn't say they were leaving Durham. They'd be more likely leaving Jarrow, South Shields or Newcastle.

(late 1969,apparently)

Hefner's 'Mary Lee' has the line "this dear has trestles hanging from her ankles", he definitely did not mean this

Jarvis Cocker wrote the song 'Manon' for Pulp about a man, without realising it's a women's name

TS: 'Lee Remick' by the Go-Betweens vs 'Lee Remick' by Hefner

George Harrison "I want to tell you"

The middle-8 has it "But if I seem to be unkind, its only me it's not my mind that is confusing things"

A couple years later he admitted he should have had it the other way round, ie "But if I seem to be unkind, it isn't me it's just my mind that is confusing things"

I wonder if he ever sang it live with the corrected lyric?

In Fickle Friends’ recent song “Turns Me Bad” the vocalist sings:

“There's something about you that I'm craving for
The way that your body makes me want more
The way that I'm losing my school of thought”

I assume she means “train of thought”, but I guess causing someone to lose an entire school of thought would be quite something.

Ooh, good one.

In "Down at the Arcade", Lou Reed confuses the Temptations with the Four Tops.

I suspect the Four Tops song 'Reach Out I'll Be There' is what he had in mind, not the Temptations' 'I'll Be There'.

Dan Fogelberg's "Hard to Say" includes the lyric

It's never easy and it's never clear
Who's to navigate and who's to steer
And so you flounder, drifting ever near the rocks

I think he meant "founder." But is that confusion or just not-quite-right usage?

I think "flounder" is correct, actually. One of its definitions is "to be in serious difficulty". To founder is to come to grief on the rocks, so he's not quite there yet.

In "Down at the Arcade", Lou Reed confuses the Temptations with the Four Tops.

LOL. Lou was often confused in his songs.

Although as anagram points out, 22 years after Lou's song, the Temptations did record a song called "I'll Be There". Confusion or startling prognostication?

In the Springsteen song "Wages of Sin," he sings "We keep paying wages of sin for the wrongs that we've done." But wages of sin are something you earn, not something you pay.

Lou was often confused in his songs.

Was he? I'd love to be half that confused, lol.

One example I did uncover (which I mentioned on The Blue Mask thread): as far as I can tell, via some online research, Syracuse U. didn't play a football game on 11/22/63 – which calls into question the details of a verse in "The Day John Kennedy Died." But Lou may have be misremembering, or (of course) using poetic license.

(I’m also assuming “upstate in a bar” means Syracuse, but he may have been somewhere else.)

Have college football teams ever played early on a Friday afternoon? Maybe the day after Thanksgiving, but 11/22/63 wasn't that.

In "Sad Song" by the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed is confused. He claims to be in love with Mary, Queen of Scots, stating that in 1493 'everything is like it should be'. However Mary was not born until 1542. Moreover he claims Henry V would have broken his heart, yet Henry died in 1422.

Maybe his European History class which covered those dates was that same afternoon.

tbf a lot of his study time was probably spent trying to comprehend how someone shot John Kennedy in the face.

In "Sad Song", Lou did admit "how wrong (he) can be".

in that fucking journey song steve perry sings that his character was "born and raised in south detroit". there is no area in detroit referred to as south detroit, though there is a neighbourhood called southwest detroit

Compare "Kids in America"

New York to East California
There's a new wave coming, I warn ya

wtf is "East California"?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/11/Eastern_California_county_map.png/250px-Eastern_California_county_map.png

I don't know either, but it looks like it has something to do with going back to Annandale.

wtf is "East California"?

it's near south detroit

I always take a cue from Woody Guthrie and tell people that Amityville is located on the New York island.

there’s clearly an east here where did it go

https://external-preview.redd.it/aIdezuom1VZW6iGaLAb2VJj_a276ZCpKlz0Ov7D8IV0.png?auto=webp&s=aba2c462e6853f536826cda274c4e1249e367e69

Kim Wilde was just giving a shout out to all the hip new wave kids in Death Valley

shoutout to Lone Pine

The west takes what the east delivers.

Daddy was a cop, on the east siiide of Chicago

John Couger confused sucking with chewing in Jack & Diane.

often confused rocking with sucking in other songs

Sucking in the USA

In "Life", Des'ree confuses a rabbit's tail with a rabbit's foot.

Doo, doot doot doo.

In "Teenage Lobotomy", the Ramones confuse severing connections in the brain's prefrontal cortex with the removal of the cerebellum.

From She's Gone:

Think I'll spend eternity in the city
Let the carbon and monoxide choke my thoughts away

I know they were just trying to fit the rhythm of the song, but I'm pretty sure carbon on it's own isn't toxic, and one oxygen molecule isn't stable by itself.

Of course, if they'd spent more of their Philly youth in chemistry class (rather than standing on a street corner singing around a trash can on fire), then they wouldn't be Hall & Oates.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/V0AAAOSwS8FhwHmO/s-l1600.jpg

one oxygen molecule isn't stable by itself

It is, actually, though a single atom (which the lyric appears to posit) isn't.

Pedanticallier than yours,

Touche

Baby when you're at the wheel
I can't believe the way I feel
It's such a rush just being with you
We're driving in the rush hour

As fond as I am of this song, I've always been rankled by the fact that the central simile... just doesn't work. Wiedlin equates the thrill of new love with the sensation of driving at speed "in the rush hour". But of course, what the occupants of a car actually experience while inching slowly forward during rush hour traffic is boredom, irritation and transient micro-hatreds.
She would know this if she'd spent more of her LA youth driving to work, rather than performing with the premier distaff new wave band. But then she wouldn't be Jane Wiedlin.

Maybe it's like "being with you is such a rush, it feels like we're driving even though it's rush hour and we've been motionless for 15 minutes in bumper-to-bumper traffic."

I thought she was making a contrast: "This rush hour is actually great!"

Not a songwriter but there is a reasonably famous William Carlos Williams poem that goes

Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper.

And numerous explicators have pointed out that WCW was probably thinking of a painting by Fragonard ("The Swing"), not Watteau.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49758842643_2c60422232_b.jpg

It's so nerdy and yet it's the ur-example of "confusing A with B"

Me, I feel like we could delve a bit deeper on the misattribution of Mary Magdalene as a penitent prostitute, but the horse has left the barn on that one

If we're going to bring in poetry, then this glorious poem by Kay Ryan got past the New Yorker factchecker, despite getting the basic biology of tree growth wrong

Tree Heart/True Heart
The hearts of trees
are serially displaced
pressed annually
outward to a ring.
They aren’t really
what we mean
by hearts, they so
easily acquiesce,
willing to thin and
stretch around some
upstart green. A
real heart does not
give way to spring.
A heart is true.
I say no more springs
without you.

Ryan has subsequently disowned the poem :(

not a song, but the original short video that Hank Azaria did for the show "Brockmire", he was using Godfather references in his sportscasting, and at one point said "Barzini's a pimp, he never coulda outfought Santino!", and I was angry because the line is "Tattaglia's a pimp"...and then in one of the episodes, they had the same piece of dialogue, but he'd fixed the reference!