5 Mistakes That Made It Into the Final Versions of Famous Songs
When you record music, you can try do-over after do-over till you manage to sing the song just right. In fact, when we listen to a pop song, there’s a good chance the singer never did get it quite perfect during any of their several takes, but then the producer spliced bits of different takes together to make the version they liked best. This song was also probably workshopped heavily between when the composer first planned it out and when they entered the recording booth, and afterward, studio computers can iron out every hiccup.
Or, maybe none of that happens. Sometimes, the flawed song makes it out into the wild, and it’s a huge success.
‘Hey Jude’ Contains an Audible ‘Fucking Hell’
There is no greater joy than realizing the song you’ve heard a thousand times features the word “fuck,” and you just never noticed it. Consider Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face,” which contains the lyric “fuck her face” eight times, and radio stations played it anyway, reasonably assuming it was simply saying “poker face.” Or, there’s “Louie, Louie,” whose unintelligible verses led the FBI to investigate it for profanity, without success — and yet, the recording actually does contain a yelled-out “fuck,” delivered by drummer Lynn Easton, at the end of the second chorus.
The most surprising example of this could well be the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” The words to this song all sound very clear, so it would seem to hold no secrets. It helps that 46 percent of the words are “na,” and 9 percent of them are “Jude.” But zip to 2:59 into the song, just a little bit before that parade of “nas” and “Judes” begins:
One of the four guys yells “fucking hell.” According to their engineer Geoff Emerick, that’s Paul McCartney’s voice. Though, Emerick wasn’t there during the recording. He says John Lennon told him Paul let out that swear, after messing up on the piano, while others claim the spontaneous utterance came from John himself.
You’ll notice the above recording labeled as a remaster, but the swear went out on every record. Fans never noticed. The song played uncensored on the radio countless times — though, the radio was often so crackly and muffled that it’s amazing anyone grew a taste for music at all, much less picked up on fucking Easter eggs.
James Blunt Screws Up the Start of ‘You’re Beautiful’
Speaking of fucking, let’s talk about James Blunt and his 2004 song “You’re Beautiful.” We say this not to comment on Blunt’s sexual prowess but are just referencing how the uncensored version of the song reveals the singer is so lovestruck by a stranger because, true to his name, he’s “fucking high.” People who know this song only through the radio never heard this, not because radio is too static-y but because the radio version changed it to “flying high.”
The “fucking high” line means this song has the honor of being one of the most profane songs ever to be parodied on Sesame Street.
“Fucking high” wasn’t a mistake. No, the mistake we’d like to talk about is the first line of the song. “My life is brilliant,” sings Blunt. Then he pauses for a few bars and comes back with the rest of the line and launches into the rest of the song.
He wasn’t supposed to open like that. He started singing too early by mistake then cut himself off before resuming singing at the correct time. They left that mistake in the recording (both the original and the radio edit). He liked it so much he even did the premature half-line in all further performances, including the “Triangle” version above.
It’s amazing that we accept this, because by repeating “My life is brilliant,” he draws attention to a line that entirely inane. A life cannot be brilliant. The life of the singer, in particular, is unremarkable; this is somewhat the point of the remainder of the song. The line makes no sense. If we didn’t know better, we’d say whoever wrote this song was high.
‘Sex on Fire’ Was a Misunderstanding
In 2008, Kings of Leon walked into the studio with an idea for a song. The verses would be about intense feelings between two people, and as for the chorus, they’d do something a little different. The chorus would be one single line. It would consist of some kind of preamble moan, and then these words: “Set us on fire.”
One of the people doing sound mixing listened in and said, “Sex on fire, huh?” That was ridiculous, of course, but the band now used that as the title for a while, as a running joke. Then they made it the final title, and made “your sex is on fire” the final chorus.
People assume “your sex is on fire” means either “you’re horny” or “you possess superb skill at sex,” but it really is an absurd line, one the band never would have come up with on their own. The best evidence of this is how even that sound engineer, on hearing something that sounded to him like “sex is on fire,” didn’t mistake the line for “sex is on fire.” He mistook it for “sex on fire,” and that phrase, which doesn’t quite mean “horny” or “good sex” became the title.
‘Time After Time’ Was a Placeholder
As you can see, composers rarely write the lyrics to a song at the exact same time as they do the melody. If they start with the melody, they might just conceive the song as “dee dee dee-dee dee-dee-dee” or “doo doo doo-doo doo-doo-doo” until they’re ready to add words to it. When Paul “Fucking Hell” McCartney wrote the song “Yesterday,” for example, he began with the opening words’ rhythm but not the words themselves. He composed the melody as he awoke from a dream, and for temporary words, he used, “Scrambled eggs. Oh my baby, how I love your legs.”
When Cyndi Lauper wrote 1983’s “Time After Time,” the phrase “time after time” itself, which makes roughly 18 appearances in the song, in both chorus and verse, was a placeholder. She had all the songs she wanted for her next album, but producer Rick Chertoff asked for one more, so she took inspiration from a film title she saw in a nearby issue of TV Guide. The film was Time After Time, starring Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells traveling through time to fight Jack the Ripper.
Lauper wrote the song with collaborator Rob Hyman. They had a melody, and they kept singing the phrase “time after time,” but they didn’t plan to leave those words in. Then, in the end, they decided the words worked fine.
The song is about someone being there for you unconditionally, or forever. They’ll be there for you “time after time” — and yet, that’s not what “time after time” means, in any other context. “Time after time” simply means “frequently.” For example, we could say that karaoke singers choose “Time After Time” time after time. We can say that in “Time After Time,” Cyndi Lauper says “time after time” time after time. But we shouldn’t say, “This song is so great, people will be singing it time after time.” That’s not what the phrase means. Or, at least it wasn’t what it meant, until the song assigned it a new meaning.
Sting Is Laughing at a Screw-Up in ‘Roxanne’
The Police’s “Roxanne” starts with Sting laughing, sounding eerily like Tommy Wiseau in The Room. The lyrics that follow aren’t especially lighthearted — they’re about the singer urging a woman to take one night off from her job as a Parisian sex worker — but this laugh sets a cheery tone, making this a song Sting can save for encores or for the whole gang to sing together after a night of Yahtzee.
To understand the laugh, which you can hear seven seconds into the video above, you really need to listen to what happens in the video two seconds before that. That discordant clang is the sound of Sting accidentally sitting on a piano’s keyboard. He thought the keyboard lid was down, but it wasn’t, so he sat on the keys, loudly, then laughed at his blunder.
They included both the chord and the laugh on the track. As a result, that album credits Sting for bass guitar, lead and backing vocals, harmonica and “butt piano.” Some people are now calling for a change in how we make music, for music and lyrics to be written by A.I. But we’re never going to get a program that accidentally hits an instrument with its butt and then chuckles over what it just did.
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