Songs where the songwriter confuses A with B

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!

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.

I think "Inertia" by the Wonder Stuff fits here. It's not completely wrong that a heavy object given a sufficient force and momentum will keep moving for a while and it would be hard to stop it, but they seem to think inertia means you can't stop moving.

It doesn't?

*mean you can't stop moving?

well it can do but also means it's really hard to start moving

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXnoWb88Jr4

Ha!

In "The Dean and I," at the moment of a critical confession of love, 10cc proclaim that "The elevator in my heart has gone AWOL, AWOL, AWOL, AWOL." Which sounds cool, but doesn't really make a lot of sense:

* This is the only use of the "elevator" metaphor in the song, and it's a concept (going AWOL) that has no particular association or clear meaning with regard to elevators.
* At a stretch, they might be suggesting that the elevator is not where it's supposed to be, like it's dropped rapidly or something, which would fit the emotional stakes of the situation, but is just really labored to my ears. Nobody either in or waiting for the elevator would ever proclaim "This elevator's gone AWOL" upon realizing it's plummeting to the bottom of the shaft.
* MAYBE they want to suggest that the elevator has flown up and out of the heart's building, like Willy Wonka's Great Glass Elevator. After all, the song was released just two years after the original Wonka film, and one year after Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator hit bookstores. But nothing else in the text supports this reach.

My conclusion: they meant to say "haywire."

think they need to see a cardiologist quickly

Now explain what the rest of the song is about.

Not sure that this one fits exactly with the theme of this thread, but it strikes me as the same kind of sacrifice of sense for the sake of the rhythm or the rhyme:

"Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in this town"

Uh, yeah, it's gonna be somewhere in this town . . . at the jail.

There might be more than one jail in the town.

Hackd iphone could be anywhere.