To Misunderstanding Song Lyrics

We’ve all been there, riding in a car or at a party, when a song comes on that we all know. And we sing along, until someone gets it wrong.

“I believe in miracles! Where ya from? You suck some eggs, you suck some eggs!” 

And the person singing has no idea, sings easily through the lyrics as if it makes perfect sense.

When I was young, I heard “Jet Airliner” by The Steve Miller Band. He’s on the road, eager to get home to his family, sleep in his bed, eat off his own plates. Sure, people think life on the road is glamorous, he suggests, but it’s really tedious, lonely. The people out here don’t really care about you.

“You know you got to go to hell before you get to heaven. Ohohoh, we don’t chat at the lineup.”

To me, it fit perfectly. I’d been on a plane before and I remembered standing in line, waiting for a boarding pass. People stood around, looking down at their tickets, maybe a magazine. (This was before cell phones). No one spoke to each other, despite the complete boredom.

No, Steve, we don’t. We don’t chat at the line up. We stand facing the back of the person in front and we wait. We will file onto the plane and fly hundreds of miles and never learn another person’s name. The song was the perfect reflection of alienation in the 20th century.

Only it wasn’t. But somehow, in my pre-adolescent brain, I’d made it fit. And I was well into my 20’s when I realized I was wrong. It began to occur to me that Miller probably wouldn’t use the word “chat” in that song and a “line up” was not the same thing as standing in a line.

I still like my version better.

A friend tells me she thought Steve Perry sang, “So now I come to you with broken arms…” How much better is that? Maybe the broken arms are real and the casts are heavy and he’s asking for just a little love, just some sympathy. Or maybe, it’s a metaphor: without her to hold, his arms feel broken. Either way, broken has a pain in it that “open” just doesn’t. Maybe Perry just missed that opportunity.

I like our songs better, the images so much more twisted and strange. But not nonsense. When we hear it, we make it work. Our imaginations take over and quickly bridge those images. Bly called it leaping poetry: the way the mind jumps, so willingly, from one idea to the next, nimble and completely confident.