Do you have difficulty hearing the words in Songs?

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I used to think "I ain't talkin bout me livin in." was "I ain't talkin bout millennium."

Thanks everyone for your replies.

Interestingly, several people in this thread mentioned the "Lola" by the Kinks (and the fact that many people had no idea what the song was about). Well, neither did I. I just liked the song because it had a nice sound and told the story of some guy dancing with a girl and drinking "Coca Cola”. LOL.

So, from my perspective, there are two distinct things happening here.

The first is being able to actually hear the individual words (in a song) and string them together (in effect, you know the words to the song). The second is being able to infer the meaning of the words, once you have successfully strung them together.

Regarding being able to hear the words. At times, I seem to have issues picking up distinct words. Interestingly, I sometimes have similar problems when listening to people talk (this could be in a conversation, when listening at a meeting, while watching a movie, or ...). It could be an executive functioning thing – where so many words are being streamed at once with a lot of other noise in parallel, that I don't have the bandwidth in short-term memory to process everything quickly enough. I am not certain.

Regarding being able to infer the meaning of the words. Even when I know the words to a song (which I can look up on the Internet), I oftentimes am puzzled by what it means. I, too, was amazed the first time I learned that Lola was about transgender. I actually had to read the lyrics several times to convince myself that it was about transgender. This happens often for me. When words are suggestive, but not explicit, I just won't get it. Interestingly, I had the same problem when reading novels.

Who doesn't have a problem with it?

Isn't that why lyric websites exist?

Google "mondegreens"

I've misheard lyrics all my life. I filled in with what it sounded like.

We didn't have an internet to look things up on.

Paperback Writer became Take a Fast Right Turn.
Pour Some Sugar on Me sounded like Gun Done Shoota Off My Leg

To this day, even though I know Bruce is singing Tenth Avenue Freeze Out, I hear Jet Devil in the Freeze Eye.

A guy name Gavin Edwards published a collection of mondegreens, people's interpretations of lyrics. It's pretty funny.

Example: Bob Dylan. The ants are my friend. They're blowin' in the wind.

Well, my wife for one.

I'm actually quite good at it. I can even do it quite easily with foreign languages. If the title is written in the Latin alphabet, I can often hear the title in the lyrics. Even if I've never studied that language. It's interesting to figure out how words are spelled and pronounced in other languages.

I usually have a hard time understanding when someone is singing but my husband can hear clearly. He has very sensitive hearing and I do not.

The same here.
But if I don´t understand it I just sing something else (often no words but only sounds).
So I don´t always understand what a song is about but I don´t really care because I listen to a song because I like the whole song (the voice, the melody and so on) and not because of the lyrics.

Yes I do because some lyrics can sound like a different word.

As a child in the Sixties I used to hear the non-rocknroll pop music played on radio stations my parents listened too. Never had any problem understanding what Sinatra, or Streisand, were singing about.

Its only when rocknroll took over, and clarity became sacrificed for expression, and when the singers voice got buried ever deeper in the mix of tech sounds did hearing words become a problem (for me, or for anyone else).

Case in point.

One of the biggest hits by Deep Purple is "Smoke on the Water". Anyone here actually KNOW what the song "Smoke on the Water" is about?

The only words I ever heard was "smoke on the water, and fire in the sky....".

But one day I found a copy of the novelty album "In a Metal Mood": No More Mr. Nice Guy" - the legendary tongue-in-cheek 90's album by Pat Boone in which he salutes Metal by doing Metal classics in an old time big band broadway style arrangements.

When I heard his rendition of "Smoke on the Water" it was easy to hear every word of the song. Its an epic tale of how the Deep Purple band was playing at the Montreux festival in Geneva Switzerland, and how some moron in the audience shot a flare gun straight up into the rafters of the building they were performing at and started a fire, and so on...

Interesting topic. I was just thinking about this today.

I totally can’t hear the words in songs. I thought everybody was like that, but apparently not my NT wife.

I wonder if it is related to the issue I have in restaurants. I have difficulty discerning words spoken at my table, amid the background clutter. Mostly I have to try to read their lips, otherwise I can’t communicate in restaurants or other loud places.

I've always put it down to that explanation, too. The sound of many people talking at once mushes into an overpowering hubbub if I'm around it for too long, and can even cause a shut-down if I'm around it for too long. At the same time, my brain seems to like the patterns in music very much, so the instrumental arrangement sucks my attention away from the vocals a lot of the time, as background music in a pub or restaurant would. I find even one-on-one conversation much more difficult if there is music playing, even if the music is far too quiet to actually drown them out.

The degrees of difficulties, or ease in understanding lyrics in songs may be based on whether, or not the producers of songs want listeners to remember the lyrics.

For example, advertisers very much want audiences to remember lyrics e.g., jingles - most of the time, both jingles, and products are pretty bad! Hence efforts are made to instill those jingles.

Another example, lyrics can be memorable from songs over the past fifty years. Some of this music is excellent e.g., the lyrics of the Beatles, and the Beatles solo artists made songs whose lyrics outlasted the times. Some of the older songs, (and some recent songs) contain memorable lyrics.

Too much of the current-day junk contain lyrics that are not memorable at all! Too much junk seems to sound all of the same!

How many remember examples of misheard lyrics?

It depends, I listen to a lot of metal and much of the time some of the vocals can be a bit hard to understand or too fast to understand perfectly if its more extreme metal with harsh vocals, not all of it is like that though. But yeah usually I will catch on after hearing a song enough times if it is in english that is. Though the lyrics can be important its not its necessary to understand every word to get the over-all feeling and energy of the song.

A lot of metal I listen to is in other languages like Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, German...ect, so I cannot really understand the lyrics unless I look them up...sometimes I want to try to sing along with the best metal vocals I can muster, but I doubt I'd get any words right, there may be a couple key words/phrases I can catch onto but that is about it.

Of course I also like stuff like Pink Floyd, and a lot of stuff with slower less intense vocals than metal I like lots of older rock and neo-pyschedelic type stuff like The Growlers or Tame Imapla...that sort of thing is not hard to sing along with.

I have this problem

yes, hearing lyrics has always been problematic for me. gets worse in louder environments (obviously) and when i am stressed/tired/distracted. i have similar issues with conversations in noisy/loud environments/when i can't partially lip read.