love that song about Ohio!

[marcicat]

I think I’ve written before about my willingness to accept lyrics as I hear them, regardless of whether they make any sense at all. (See: “she’s gonna have kittens,” and “it’s worth all the ex-laws,” which I *still* think is a better line than “all that’s lost.”)

Anyway, I’ve gotten tripped up by this twice recently. The first one I blame on rhyming, and also on the fact that the pace of ‘Such a Simple Thing’ (Ray LaMontagne) is very slow, so my brain has a lot of time to autocomplete the lyrics before they actually happen.

The actual song apparently goes like this:
Tell me what your heart wants
Such a simple thing
My heart is like paper
Yours is like a flame

But my brain goes to this, because rhymes are cool, and apparently I think this song is about arts and crafts:
(mumble mumble mumble) thing
My heart is like paper
Yours is like a string

And THEN! I was listening to the radio this morning, and the DJ said they were going to play the new Passenger song, and I was like, “Oh, cool, this is that song about Ohio, right?” (It totally made me cry last week, except it turns out my brain was once again making stuff up, because the song is called “Hell or High Water,” and is not, in fact, about Ohio.)

The internet tells me the lyrics go like this:
Was it the trick of the light?
Or a shot in the dark?
Was it hell or high water that broke our hearts?

And if you’ve ever heard a Passenger song, it will probably not come as a surprise that my brain hears them like this:
(mumble mumble mumble)
(lyrical mumble)
We had Ohio, and it broke our hearts

Why do I think Ohio is so sad? I don’t know! My version doesn’t even make sense! (To be fair, I’m not sure theirs does either.)

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.