Lyrics that Stress the Wrong Syl-LA-ble

There’s a Dan Fogelberg song that was a hit back in 1975 called “Part of the Plan.” It’s a good tune that I’d forgotten all about until recently, when a friend of mine gave me a copy of the album Souvenirs. I listened to the opening track and scratched my head a bit, because while I remembered the tune, I still didn’t know what the heck Fogelberg was saying during the chorus. Was he mentioning an exotic city somewhere? A bar? A dance I’m unfamiliar with?

No, he was saying “One day we’ll all un-DER-stand,” stressing the wrong syl-LA-ble. It sounded weird when I was six. It sounds weird today at age 56.

And it brought to mind additional cases where songwriters have taken huge liberties with their lyrics, asking the audience to basically shrug off what is clearly artistic license gone awry.

On my podcast recently (episode 74), we featured a song called “Mirage Zone” by Hot Mama Silver. In preparation for the recording, I listened to the song multiple times, not knowing what it was called, and I didn’t figure the title out until I read it. The singer sings, “MEER-age Zone,” instead of “Mir-AGE Zone,” and it’s the most important part of the tune! The title! Hot Mama Silver did themselves no favors with this one.

I thought of some other tunes that stress wrong syllables for the sake of the melody, and some of them are hits - fantastic songs in every other way.

Stevie Wonder takes all sorts of liberties with the syllables on his amazing song, “I Wish,” the most egregious being in the chorus: “Why did those days e-VER have to go.”

The first line of Alanis Morissette’s breakout hit, “You Oughta Know,” stresses the wrong syllable:

“I want you to know, I’m hap-PY for you,” and she goes on to sing the words eloquent-LY and ba-BY. But hey, there’s no denying the song’s greatness. I still remember hearing it for the first time en route from Detroit to Muskegon, Michigan, and I was floored. Now, you could make the argument that the odd stresses in this song mirror the singer’s seething anger, a case when what one says doesn’t come out calm or controlled or correct.

You could argue that, but Morissette is a repeat offender, as a contributor to this link highlights. It was pointed out that she outdid her mis-syllabic self on the song “Uninvited,” (another song I like):

“I am fla-TERED by…”
“I have sim-PLY”
“An un-for-TUN-ate slight.”

Ugh. Yeah, I like the tune, but that’s pretty bad.

Another hit song with a misplaced stress is Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” when they sing, “When the rain wa-SHES you clean you’ll know.”

The above-referenced link of syllabic stresses has a lot more examples, including several I hadn’t thought of:

Eric Clapton, “Won’t you be my FOR-ever woman.”

Stevie Wonder again, from “You Are the Sunshine of My Life, when he sings, “Because you came to my res-CUE.”

The Beatles “Old Brown Shoe” with the line, “My love is something you can’t RE-ject.”

The list could go on and on. But what are we do make of it, especially if you’re a songwriter? Should lyrics always be sung the way we speak? Probably not, but I would say most of the time, yes. If you’re purposely stressing a wrong syllable to be clever or for comedic effect – a sort of “wink” to the audience – then I think it can be not only justified, but downright genius. One contributor to the above thread wrote about Ira Gershwin employing stresses for comedic effect in the song “It Ain’t Necessrily So”:

“He made his home in
that fish’s ab-DO-men.”

That’s great! And I imagine that showtunes are full of these types of examples. Hip hop and rap, too.

But many of the above examples seem to simply be laziness. When a word didn’t fit the meter, the songwriter just stuck with it even if it sounded odd. That certainly isn’t the ideal. No one is denying (or at least I’m not) the merits of each and every song I mentioned above, but I’m confident that they would all have benefited if the offending lyrics had been replaced by words that fit the stresses naturally.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!

But now I’m wondering how many misplaced stresses I’ve written in my repertoire. There are probably a few!