Tuesday, July 24, 2007
From the misunderstood lyric files
This is a smaller subfolder in the overstuffed misheard lyrics file. Until this weekend, as far as I know, it only had one entry, which was me thinking that the "Paul was a real estate novelist" line in Billy Joel's "Piano Man" meant that Paul wrote novels about real estate, when in fact he's just a guy in real estate who wants to be a novelist. (Thank you, Diana, for that clarification.) But now I have cause to add another. This one comes courtesy of The Carpenters, a band that I always associate with Francesca, because she adores them more than anyone on the planet, possibly including the surviving members of The Carpenters themselves. Oh, and they also remind me of the worst episode of Dawson's Creek of all time, a stand-alone from Season 5 in which Joey gets mugged, then her mugger gets hit by a car, and she ends up singing a duet of "Close to You" with him in the hospital shortly before he dies. You know, now that I think about it, that might be the worst episode ever in the history of television, not just Dawson's Creek.
But anyway. Whether sung by Joey Potter and a mugger, Francesca, Karen Carpenter or some combination of the above, whenever I heard the first line of "Close to You" ("Why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near"), I always envisioned little twittering birds popping up, all Disney-like, around the head of whomever the person was singing to. Which, as I pointed out to Dave, would be kind of scary for me, what with my fear and loathing of birds and all. That's when he informed me that he thought "birds suddenly appearing" was Karen Carpenter-speak for butterflies in the stomach. Which makes so much more sense, when you think about it. But, as usual, the real version is a lot less entertaining than the one in my crazy mind.
This is a smaller subfolder in the overstuffed misheard lyrics file. Until this weekend, as far as I know, it only had one entry, which was me thinking that the "Paul was a real estate novelist" line in Billy Joel's "Piano Man" meant that Paul wrote novels about real estate, when in fact he's just a guy in real estate who wants to be a novelist. (Thank you, Diana, for that clarification.) But now I have cause to add another. This one comes courtesy of The Carpenters, a band that I always associate with Francesca, because she adores them more than anyone on the planet, possibly including the surviving members of The Carpenters themselves. Oh, and they also remind me of the worst episode of Dawson's Creek of all time, a stand-alone from Season 5 in which Joey gets mugged, then her mugger gets hit by a car, and she ends up singing a duet of "Close to You" with him in the hospital shortly before he dies. You know, now that I think about it, that might be the worst episode ever in the history of television, not just Dawson's Creek.
But anyway. Whether sung by Joey Potter and a mugger, Francesca, Karen Carpenter or some combination of the above, whenever I heard the first line of "Close to You" ("Why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near"), I always envisioned little twittering birds popping up, all Disney-like, around the head of whomever the person was singing to. Which, as I pointed out to Dave, would be kind of scary for me, what with my fear and loathing of birds and all. That's when he informed me that he thought "birds suddenly appearing" was Karen Carpenter-speak for butterflies in the stomach. Which makes so much more sense, when you think about it. But, as usual, the real version is a lot less entertaining than the one in my crazy mind.
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