One of the pleasures of shuffle-play on an iPod is learning new things about old songs through your headphones. This happened to me recently with two songs: 1. Billy Joel, “Big Shot.” I had forgotten Billy Joel’s vocals in the first five seconds of “Big Shot,” which I would transcribe as, “Sssssshmt. Oooh.” It sounds […]

posted 7 December 2010 in Tasty Bits. 2 comments

I’m basically out of the mondegreen business these days, but I still file away misheard lyrics, and recently had two that you may find interesting. The first was from Jay-Z on his “Empire State of Mind” single with Alicia Keys. I thought he was rapping “Long live the World Trade / Long live the Kingdome,” […]

posted 2 December 2010 in Tasty Bits. no comments yet

1. XTC, “Dear God” 2. John Lennon, “God” 3. The Sugarcubes, “Deus” 4. Randy Newman, “Old Man” 5. Tom Jones/John Lee Hooker, “Burning Hell” Point out the songs I missed in the comments before a vengeful Lord smites me down.

posted 5 October 2010 in Tasty Bits. 4 comments

From Bruce Springsteen’s “Incident on 57th Street”: Puerto Rican Jane, oh, won’t you tell me, what’s your name? Dude, you know her name. It’s “Puerto Rican Jane.”

posted 27 September 2010 in Tasty Bits. no comments yet

In the Beatles’ “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” Paul McCartney sings: And so I quit the police department / And got myself a steady job Leaving aside the overuse of “and” to fill out the lines–how does McCartney think police employment works? Seasonally? Piecework? What kind of crazy freelance police work is the […]

posted 20 September 2010 in Tasty Bits. 2 comments

1. Fozzie Bear 2. Winnie the Pooh 3. Paddington 4. Yogi Bear 5. The unnamed bear in The Winter’s Tale (“Exit, pursued by a bear”)

posted 13 September 2010 in Tasty Bits. 4 comments

1. “She Loves You” (in “All You Need Is Love”) 2. “I Am the Walrus” (in “Glass Onion”) 3. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (in “I Am the Walrus”) 4. “Strawberry Fields Forever” (in “Glass Onion”) 5. “You Never Give Me Your Money” (in “Carry That Weight”)

posted 25 August 2010 in Tasty Bits. 3 comments

For a long time, releasing an album with Volume One somewhere in the title seemed like a good way to ensure there would never be a Volume Two, unless those songs were already recorded (e.g., George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1 or in a similar vein, Hall and Oates’ Rock ’n Soul Part 1). […]

posted 24 March 2010 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment

I was thinking about musicians who have belonged to at least two major rock bands. There’s a lot of them, so let’s narrow it down: I’m interested in the sidemen, not stars like Dave Grohl or Eric Clapton. For our purposes today, spinoff projects don’t count (where two or more people from one band start […]

posted 1 March 2010 in Tasty Bits. 9 comments

Number of Google results for the following phrases: “first banana”–92,500 “second banana”–88,200 “third banana”–39,100 “fourth banana”–4,010 “fifth banana”–1,830 “sixth banana”–292 “seventh banana”–522 “eighth banana”–344 “ninth banana”–9,070 “tenth banana”–264 “eleventh banana”–29 “twelfth banana”–40 “thirteenth banana”–270 “fourteenth banana”–10 “fifteenth banana”–617 “sixteenth banana”–113 “seventeenth banana”–110 “eighteenth banana”–57 “nineteenth banana”–3 “twentieth banana”–53 “twenty-first banana”–3 “twenty-second banana”–0 You have to […]

posted 4 January 2010 in Tasty Bits. 4 comments