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Mistakes and weird things in songs

Started by popcorn, September 12, 2018, 01:56:00 PM

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One from the lore of ancient pre-internet days: Michael Stipe corpses on one of the lines about "Dr. Seuss" in "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite"

TheMonk

Les Boys was accidentally added to the album Making Movies by Dire Straits.

Phil_A

Quote from: Pearly-Dewdrops Drops on September 13, 2018, 05:39:59 AM
One from the lore of ancient pre-internet days: Michael Stipe corpses on one of the lines about "Dr. Seuss" in "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite"

Not a goof as such, but if you listen closely to Man On The Moon, you might notice it sounds like they had one good take of the chorus which they just reused throughout the whole song. This is particularly noticeable at the end when it's repeated twice (which always feels a bit of a "Will this do?" ending for such an otherwise decent song).

https://youtu.be/dLxpNiF0YKs?t=223


Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

An odd bit on Motion the 11 by Cornershop, in which the singer stops what he's doing and starts telling the engineer to press record - which they already had done, because we're listening to the recording of him telling them to press record.

DrGreggles

There's a bit in that awful Titanic song which is clearly a bad edit, as Celine Dion sings "Dan don" instead of "And on".

doppelkorn

In Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock, the "zuh zuh zuh" verse was MC Globe (I think?) just forgetting his lines.

Someone like J-Lo or Rhianna then nicked it in one of their songs in the 00s.

EDIT: looked it up and it was Pow Wow, not MC Globe.

famethrowa

I've been trying to sell this one for years, but no-one's with me: in Should Have Known Better by the Fabs (not Jim Diamond), George hits the wrong chord completely at the end of the guitar solo. He plays an Em chord, obviously expecting the song to go to the middle eight (actually 14), but gets away with it because it works as a G6 chord against the harmonica section. Except it doesn't really fit, it's a mistake and I know it.

Johnny Textface

Black - Wonderful Life

Can someone explain what happens to the words 'to run' just before the first chorus? It sounds like a bad overdub or something.


Glebe

Quote from: McChesney Duntz on September 12, 2018, 10:29:58 PMThe Fabs had all sorts of cock-ups in their catalogue

One of the most famous of course being the "down" line editing snafu in 'Happiness is a Warm Gun' (at 00:57).

Apparently Kim Deal screws up the "ri ri" harmonies in Pixies 'River Euphrates'.

Chriddof

Another famous Fabs mistake, and a very noticeable one, is the glitchy edit on the vocal track of Revolution (the single version). At the start of the third verse, the lines "You say you'll change the constitution / Well, you know / we all want to change your head" has a completely fucked-up punch-in edit halfway through that last word. Given the methods of the recording of that track and the general ethos of the song, though, it seems that Lennon decided to leave it as-is.

I'm sure I've got this slightly wrong, but I heard that the weird fade out and slow fade back in at the start of "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" was a common thing to do for preparing mixed-down recordings of test mixes, to prevent them from being used as actual finished recordings on vinyl. But it seems in this instance that didn't work.

Twit 2


Dr Rock

I really like the Mamas & The Papas one, it's a very joyous song and the pre-cum 'I saw her...' anticipates another lovely chorus.

Also the beginning of Bob Dylan's 115th Dream. What's so funny Bob?

Slightly awkward edit between two different takes of the vocal in John Cale's 'Leaving It Up to You'. At 1:49 the "I KNOWWW YOU COULD ALL FEEL SAFE" seems to have had the beginning of the "I" shaved off


buzby

Bernard's startled yelps just before the first verse of Temptation due to Hooky running into the studio and putting a snowball down the neck of his shirt when he was recording the vocals
Bernard hocking up a greenie during the instrumental climax of Lonesome Tonight
The sequenced synth on Blue Monday that fades in at the start is a 16th note out of sync to the drum machine pattern because Gillian forgot to put the first note in when programming the sequencer (most noticeable when it reappears after the first line of the first verse).

Nowhere Man

Another Beatles fuck up that i'm quite fond of is when Macca's voice noticeably cracks when Lennon/McCartney are doing the high harmonies halfway through 'If I Fell'

"and I, would be sad if our new love, was in vain"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_80s6S_7Vw&feature=youtu.be&t=1m41s

Jockice

A tape unspooling (apparently) 3.05 into this excellent Orange Juice track. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7X5gt60DME

On the subject of The Smiths, my vinyl copy of their first album had a bit where it jumps slightly and makes a scratchy sound at the end of the first verse of Miserable Lie. It always had since I bought it and I became so used to it that when I bought the album on CD and it wasn't on there, it took me quite by surprise, let me tell you.

Thomas

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on September 12, 2018, 11:54:10 PM
The weird fade in and out on hand in glove Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others can't be deliberate can it?

I think I once read, somewhere, that it's supposed to emulate the sense of a door slowly closing and then opening again.

Quote from: famethrowa on September 13, 2018, 12:01:39 PM
I've been trying to sell this one for years, but no-one's with me: in Should Have Known Better by the Fabs (not Jim Diamond), George hits the wrong chord completely at the end of the guitar solo. He plays an Em chord, obviously expecting the song to go to the middle eight (actually 14), but gets away with it because it works as a G6 chord against the harmonica section. Except it doesn't really fit, it's a mistake and I know it.

I agree it doesn't fit, but I don't think it's a mistake. I wonder if the bottom harmony line towards the end of the solo might've been recorded as a separate overdub, in which case the melody is very deliberate.

Seems like they wanted the instrumental section to stick out as a bit different, but I would've achieved that by ending the melody on the tonic as you expect, but laying the 6th chord above it, an octave higher.

Look at me, presuming to tell the Beatles something about the art of songwriting.

yesitsme

I've bore a long grudge against Carol Decker and those T'Pau bastards.

My sister owned the album China in yer Hands was off.  The sleeve had the lyrics to the songs printed on them and they bore NO resemblance to the words in the actual songs.

Genuinely het up over this for what - 30 years?

Love a good grudge me.

grassbath

Quote from: McChesney Duntz on September 12, 2018, 10:29:58 PM
The Fabs had all sorts of cock-ups in their catalogue, but the gradual exhausted/stoned drop in tempo throughout "You Won't See Me" made me think I was losing my mind the first time I listened to the Rubber Soul CD on headphones...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsjTO0yZQjk

Fucking hell. I must have listened to that song hundreds of times without noticing that.

the ouch cube

Dinosaur Jr's 'Lose' has a quite terrifying (in headphones) background voice at 2:16, which is just J saying "burning" through some effect, but sounds as close to the devil-in-the-studio Satanic message of popular Christian fundie imagination as I've ever heard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_q_UTiVMGU


Peru

The bass in 'The Boss' is audibly out.

All the vocals in California Dreamin' are noticeably flat compared to the instrumentation. And the flute solo is sharp. The whole thing just sounds so out of tune, it ruins the song for me. If I want to listen to the song (because it's a great song), I put on the Beach Boys' cover, which is probably some kind of sacrilege.

Flouncer

One More Cup of Coffee by Bob Dylan - Emmylou Harris fucks up the chorus the first time; she's singing harmony and accidentally sings the second line first. I think it was a very early take and it was so good they thought fuck it.

It really tickles me when, on a couple of Syd Barrett songs, he kind of stalls with the guitar and you can hear paper rustling as he moves on to the next page of his lyrics. Also the sound of his guitar pick scraping the strings can be really loud - I can remember reading somewhere (might have been in that leaflet thing Malcolm Jones wrote on the making of The Madcap Laughs) that on some of his songs he was just sat there with a mic pointing at him, singing softly and playing his Telecaster without plugging it into anything.

Quote from: popcorn on September 12, 2018, 01:56:00 PMMusic theory people tell me that all the notes fit in the scale, technically, but somethin just don't sound right about that moment.

Once I wrote this piece of music which had a vibraphone part, and the drummer told me there was a "wrong note" in it. I thought, how the fuck can it be wrong? I wrote it like that! If I ever wrote an essay on writing music, like a musical equivalent of Orwell's Politics and the English Language, one of my rules would be, "There's nowt wrong with a bit of dissonance." I tried playing some Thelonious Monk tunes for my girlfriend, and she reckons he was just crap at playing the piano. She laughed when I told her that Larkin called him "the elephant on the keyboard." It's all subjective, I suppose - if it sounds wrong to you, fair enough.

Quote from: Kane Jones on September 12, 2018, 02:42:04 PM
Led Zeppelin's Good Times Bad Times. John Paul Jones happily continuing the solo section for half a bar before realising the others are playing the chorus.

Sometimes, you can get away with this as a bass player. I can't think of any off the top of my head, but there have been plenty of times I've been listening to something and been pretty sure that the bass player has fucked up and started playing the same bit again, only to realise and carry on as if nothing has happened. I do this quite a lot myself, and often you can cheat it at least to the point of the casual listener not realising.

Kane Jones

Quote from: Flouncer on September 14, 2018, 07:52:49 PM
Sometimes, you can get away with this as a bass player. I can't think of any off the top of my head, but there have been plenty of times I've been listening to something and been pretty sure that the bass player has fucked up and started playing the same bit again, only to realise and carry on as if nothing has happened. I do this quite a lot myself, and often you can cheat it at least to the point of the casual listener not realising.

Yeah, I guess you're right. It stands out to me though. The same exact thing happens on Burning Spear's Marcus Garvey.

DJ Bob Hoskins

Another R.E.M. one: Michael Stipe's lead vocal on "Wolves, Lower" was apparently recorded outdoors and you can hear the faint sound of crickets chirping in the background during the last chorus (from around 3:35).

Glebe

Quote from: yesitsme on September 14, 2018, 03:32:12 PMI've bore a long grudge against Carol Decker and those T'Pau bastards.

My sister owned the album China in yer Hands was off.  The sleeve had the lyrics to the songs printed on them and they bore NO resemblance to the words in the actual songs.

Genuinely het up over this for what - 30 years?

Love a good grudge me.

It's not worth it, mate. Let it go.

Let it go.

popcorn

#59
Quote from: Flouncer on September 14, 2018, 07:52:49 PM
Once I wrote this piece of music which had a vibraphone part, and the drummer told me there was a "wrong note" in it. I thought, how the fuck can it be wrong? I wrote it like that! If I ever wrote an essay on writing music, like a musical equivalent of Orwell's Politics and the English Language, one of my rules would be, "There's nowt wrong with a bit of dissonance." I tried playing some Thelonious Monk tunes for my girlfriend, and she reckons he was just crap at playing the piano. She laughed when I told her that Larkin called him "the elephant on the keyboard." It's all subjective, I suppose - if it sounds wrong to you, fair enough.

I've had a similar experience. I wrote a song and then wrote a bassline for it and when the bassist and I took it to the other guitarist he insisted it contained a bum note. The drummer, who understands music theory better than the rest of us, insisted it was "correct" and thought it sounded fine, but the guitarist winced every time he heard it.

It's an odd one. It's not like Radiohead songs are short of dissonance generally. But that in that one moment in the song, the guitar suddenly just goes CLANGGG, to my ear at least. It's not actually strumming a chord any different from it does through the rest of the song - there's just something about the way the notes come through in that exact moment that sounds awful to my brain.