Songs where the songwriter confuses A with B

Another thing that runaway lied to him about

don't stop believin, hoser

"I ran the phonetics of east, west, and north, but nothing sounded as good or emotionally true to me as South Detroit," he told the reporter. "It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve learned that there is no South Detroit. But it doesn't matter."

Also, if you get on a train at midnight (or any time, really), it has a specific route and destination. You have, presumably, purchased a ticket. Maps are widely available. You can't just go "anywhere."

Like, Antarctica or the Moon or Madagascar. Very difficult to reach by train.

"The Night Chicago Died" is about a shoot-out between the Chicago Police and gangsters tied to Al Capone. It was inspired by the real-life Saint Valentine's Day Massacre,[2] although that involved Capone's men killing seven of Bugs Moran's gang members and had nothing to do with the police. No confrontation large enough to leave around one hundred police deaths ever happened. Al Capone was arrested in 1932 for income tax evasion.

The song's events supposedly take place "on the East Side of Chicago". Chicago has three commonly referred-to regions: the North Side, the West Side and the South Side. There is no East Side, as Lake Michigan is immediately east of Downtown Chicago. While there is an area of Chicago known as "East Side", it is a neighborhood on the Far South Side on the Illinois/Indiana state line. East Side is also several miles away from where Capone lived on Prairie Avenue in Chicago. Furthermore, in the 1920s, East Side was known for being a quiet, residential, and predominantly Eastern European neighborhood—a sharp contrast from the site of the bloodbath described in the song.

Songwriters Peter Callender and Mitch Murray said in interviews (most notably on Beat Club shortly after the song's smash success) that they had never been to Chicago before that time, and that their knowledge of the city and that period of its history had been based on gangster films. (Callender defended his interpretation of Chicago's geography by saying, "There's an East Side of everywhere!")

As reported by History.com:

"...in England there were at least a few young men that didn’t have all the facts straight, and in the 1970s their pop group from Nottingham turned their romantic misunderstanding of American history into a historically dubious yet gloriously catchy hit record. Though it was never intended for the American market, Paper Lace’s "The Night Chicago Died" crossed the Atlantic and became a #1 hit on the U.S. pop charts..."[2]

Paper Lace sent the song to the mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, who greatly disliked it.[3] A member of Daley's staff is quoted as saying that Paper Lace should "jump in the Chicago River, placing your heads under water three times and surfacing twice. Pray tell us, are you nuts?”[4]

The Antartica route was discontinued in 1981, after lots of Journey fans who showed up at the train station asking to go "anywhere" ended up freezing to death there.

Play Don't Stop Believin' on a piano with a lot of jagged passing chords and a plaintive growl, rhyme "believing" with "bleeding" somewhere, and you could mistake the lyric for early Tom Waits.

It would be called "Streetlight People"

Just a city boi

Born and raised in North Hanoi

Once there was this girl who
left her small town to take the midnight train
But when she bought her ticket
She didn't know where she was going
She said it didn't matter
Just take me anywhere

Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm

Collected via social media:

Maybe I'm being pedantic but the new Dua Lipa song, Houdini, uses the line "Catch me or I go Houdini" to imply she'll disappear. But Houdini was primarily an escape artist. Outside of the metamorphosis trick, which was a swap, he never disappeared himself. It feels like the song writer had no idea other than the name means magician.

(primo pedantic post, imo)

Houdini plays the mamba

Melle Mel confuses salty with bitter

I've brought this up elsewhere, but in "Hot Stuff" by Donna Summer the songwriter seems to confuse making other people's phones ring with having your own phone rung.

Sittiin' here eatin' my heart out waiting
Waiting for some lover to call
Dialed about at thousand numbers lately
Almost rang the phone off the wall

Someone offered the explanation that this may be the British usage of "ring," as in another word for call, and in fact the lyricist is British (Pete Bellotte, I think). Always sounded funny to me though.

that reads like two separate thoughts to me - first two lines are "i'm waiting for a lover to find me," second two lines are "i'm actively out here looking for lovers as well"

But whose phone is being rung off the wall?

The LOL Britishes explanation seems likely but awkward, ungrammatical and not something anyone would say irl.

Man, if it was Donna Summer, I'd bet all thousand numbers rang her back.

oh boy, ranging phones, that's where i'm a viking

wait, what is confusing? to ring somebody means to call them in USA too

If I heard someone say "My phone was ringing off the wall" I would assume they meant they were getting lots of calls, not making lots of calls.

ring my phone
off the wall

Americans only started saying they "ring" someone in the Internet Age when the English language has flattened out worldwide and Americans have adopted English idioms and vice versa. No one in America in the 1980s said they would "ring" someone unless they were PBS-watching Anglophiles.

I'm in the phone booth, it's the one across the hall
If you don't answer, I'll just ring it off the wall

"almost rang the phone off the wall" of all her friends' kitchens guys come on jeez

Me, in a song I wrote:

"I sent my coals to Coventry"

Which I was sure was an idiom but appears to be a conflation of "Send someone to Coventry" and "Send coals to Newcastle"

Americans only started saying they "ring" someone in the Internet Age when the English language has flattened out worldwide and Americans have adopted English idioms and vice versa. No one in America in the 1980s said they would "ring" someone unless they were PBS-watching Anglophiles.

Oh, just saw President Keyes' post, sorry

I think there's a slight distinction there between ringing an object and ringing a person, with the latter being definitely rare in the US of the '70s/'80s

(Also Blondie didn't write that song, but they were certainly Anglophiles!)

I don't think you "ring" an object in the UK either though? People don't say "ring my phone", they say "ring me".

HP Baxxter has no problem ringing up da laydeez:

"I’ve always been the party pleaser
There’s not a doubt, I’ve checked all the ladies out

Ring me up!
Skip to the dip now!
What we say?
Jigga Jigga!

Ooooohh! Ho-ho!
Davay-davay-davay!
Jigga Jigga!
Allright!
Aaaaaarrrghh!"

whether he has confused A with B, however, remains moot

ring a ring of roses?

songwriter confuses the bubonic plague with making a telephone call

You can, however, ring someone's bell

xpost

anita baker - ring my bell

the white stripes - my doorbell

I did indeed circle both of these with a marker pen

oh, XP

xp to Tom Well I was thinking it's easy to slide from a common phrase like "ring my bell" to "ring my phone" and there's no confusion if Donna Summer is ringing someone else's phone. But in the phrasing of "Hot Stuff" she's first calling lots of different numbers and then one particular phone is being rung off the wall, so I was trying to imagine if in UK usage you can ring your own phone off the wall (actually someone else suggested the possibility first in another thread). But you said before that would be awkward phrasing, so maybe not.

She's making so many phone calls that the resonance of the ringing coming through the earpiece is going to sonically blast her own phone off the wall.

You can certainly ring a bell, true! Also the changes.

anita baker ward - ring my bell

He could play a guitar just like ringing a bell

In "Safe From Harm" I'm pretty sure Massive Attack didn't mean to say "what happened to the deliberately treated small details of my childhood days"

Haha I have always wondered about that line