Lyrics aren't always intelligible...
... and I don't mean just punk songs with screaming lead singers or hip-hop artists and with obscure terms that I don't quite get.
I'll sometimes think of a song and somehow get the lyrics a little wrong--they're misremembered enough that I can't find the original song!
We've talked about mondegreens before, but this isn't quite one of those (a mondegreen is where you mishear and misremember a lyric in another form).
This is the case when I can remember perfectly well (nearly), but still can't find it.
Here are three songs that I heard at different times and places. I'll tell you what I recall--can you figure out what the songs really are?
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| The Christmas Goat, a symbol of the holiday in Scandinavia. |
1. I remember hearing a beautiful a capella song in a Christmas concert where the lyrics were something like: Yule, Yule, Yule. The problem is that the song wasn't in English, but in a Scandinavian language. From just this fragment of description, can you find the original song? (A link to a YouTube recording of it would be nice.) What's the actual title?
2. When I was visiting a German biergarten last fall, about every fifteen minutes the band would play a short song and EVERYONE would sing the chorus together. But I couldn't quite get one word in the chorus. It's just Eins, zwei... sofa?? I know "eins" and "zwei" but what's "sofa" got to do with it? Can you find what the lyrics REALLY are? (Mostly, what's the deal with"sofa"?)
3. At another concert in the middle of summer I heard a lovely fa-la-la-la song with an unusual lyric in the middle--it was something like running in and out delights thee. As a runner, I noticed that line and remembered it, but I can't figure what song it is! Can you figure out what song this is from?
Extra credit: When was that song first published, and what was the title of the songbook?
Hope you enjoy these small Challenges. They're not that hard to find, but will require a bit of search technique. Be sure to tell us HOW you found each of these songs, and what SearchResearch skill you used!
Let us know in the comments section.
Search on!
