Do you remember when you first learned that the Peter, Paul & Mary song "Puff, the Magic Dragon" was really about marijuana? If you were like most people, it blew your mind. How could a tune that seemed so innocent, that we all sang when we were kids, possibly be a not-so-subtle metaphor for drugs?
As it turns out, we were duped. "Puff, the Magic Dragon" really was about a magical dragon and not just drug propaganda. But if we learned nothing else from the experience, it was to never take a song at face value. The catchiest of melodies can hide some pretty disturbing lyrics. If you're not careful, you can end up slow dancing at your wedding to a song you thought was super-romantic but was really about a guy in serious need of a restraining order. Here are 30 examples of beloved pop songs that aren't actually about what you think they're about.
1 | "Every Breath You Take" by The Police
If you came of age in the '80s, there's a good chance they played this song at your prom or homecoming dance. If you're not paying attention, it might sound like an ode to endless love. But listen again and you'll realize it's actually told from the point-of-view of a stalker. Even Sting is stunned by how his lyrics have been completely misunderstood. "I think the song is very, very sinister and ugly," he says. "People have actually misinterpreted it as being a gentle little love song, when it's quite the opposite."
2 | "Hey Ya!" by Outkast
We were all too busy singing "Shake it like a Polaroid picture" to wonder what this song was really saying, but you don't have to read between the lines to realize it's about a profoundly unhappy marriage. We get our first clue when André 3000 starts thanking Mom and Dad "for sticking through together/because we don't know how." We never get the full picture of why and how his relationship is so miserable, but there are hints with lines like "separate's always better" and the part about being in denial because "we know we're not happy here." But he or she or whoever André is addressing doesn't want to hear because "you just want to dance."
3 | "Closing Time" by Semisonic
What else could this be but a song about a bar closing at the end of the night and the bartender telling everybody to get out? Well, as it turns out, it's really about a baby being born. Singer Dan Wilson wrote this song for his daughter, who was born 3 months prematurely. Wilson tried to keep the lyrics ambiguous, so his bandmates wouldn't get annoyed about playing a song about a baby. But at this point, Wilson is mostly amused that nobody figured it out. "Millions and millions of people bought the song and heard the song and didn't get it," he once said during a show. "They think it's about being bounced from a bar but it's about being bounced from the womb."
4 | "You Can Call Me Al" by Paul Simon
Anytime we hear the song, we automatically think of that video with Chevy Chase, where he hilariously lip syncs next to a miserable-looking Paul Simon. As it turns out, Simon was giving more clues about what the song's about than Chase. "Whoa my nights are so long," Simon sings. "Where's my wife and family? What if I die here?" And the existential dread just gets worse from there. The song's narrator wanders through a foreign country, out of money and looking for "angels in the architecture." His wife is gone, he's hallucinating, he's in a downward spiral. Whatever the future holds for him, it isn't good.
5 | "MMMBop" by Hanson
You probably thought "MMMbop" was just a nonsense song about a nonsense word. But it may be one of the most deeply philosophical songs ever written and performed by kids. Zac Hanson, who was just 11 when the song was released, explained that "MMMBop" is really about the "futility of life." Say what?
"Things are going to be gone," he went on, "whether it's your age and your youth, or maybe the money you have, or whatever it is." The lyrics definitely don't come across as playfully lighthearted as the music. "You have so many relationships in this life/Only one or two will last/You go through all the pain and strife/Then you turn your back and they're gone so fast." Wow, that is sad!
6 | "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt
James Blunt didn't mince words when explaining his reaction to fans who think "You're Beautiful" is a romantic ballad. "These people are [messed] up," he said. So if it's not supposed to a paean to a woman's beauty, what is going on exactly? "It's about a guy who's high as a kite on drugs in the subway stalking someone else's girlfriend when that guy is there in front of him," Blunt explained. "He should be locked up or put in prison for being some kind of perv."
7 | "Got to Get You Into My Life" by The Beatles
This foot-tapping tune by Paul McCartney always seemed pretty straightforward. "Ooh, then I suddenly see you/Ooh, did I tell you I need you/Every single day of my life!" It's got to be about a woman he fancies, right? Not really. The truth was revealed in a 1997 biography titled Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, in which McCartney explains that he wrote the song "when I had first been introduced to pot. So it's really a song about that, it's not to a person… It's actually an ode to pot. Like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret."
8 | "Born in the U.S.A." by Bruce Springsteen
If you're judging by the chorus, this song used in presidential campaigns by Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole is about as patriotic as it gets.
"Born in the USA! I'm a cool rockin' Daddy in the USA!"
But the rest of Springsteen's fist-pumping anthem begs to differ with this optimism, which mourns a Vietnam war vet "Sent me off to a foreign land/To go and kill the yellow man." The most depressing verse tells of a brother who went to fight the Viet Cong. "They're still there," Springsteen mournfully sings. "He's all gone."
9 | "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler
Sometimes breakup songs take a tearful look at a relationship that fell apart, and sometimes they're not about breakups at all but really about vampires. Wait, what? Jim Steinman, the guy who penned "Total Eclipse of the Heart" for Bonnie Tyler, says the song's original title was "Vampires in Love" and if you listen carefully to the lyrics, "they're really like vampire lines," he says. "It's all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love's place in dark." Give it a listen and you'll see what he means. Lyrics like "And if you only hold me tight/We'll be holding on forever" sure does sound like a vampires declaration of "undying" love.
10 | "Heart-Shaped Box" by Nirvana
There've been some wild claims about what troubled genius Kurt Cobain was trying to say with this song's bizarre lyrics. Probably the strangest explanation came from his widow, Courtney Love, who insists the song is about her, um… private area. But in the authorized Nirvana biography Come As You Are, Cobain was pretty clear about the song's meaning, explaining that it's about "little kids with cancer."
Apparently he watched some infomercials that featured terminally ill children and found it "sadder than anything I can think of."
11 | "In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins
The rumors surrounding this Phil Collins hit are nothing short of macabre. As the urban legend goes, Collins wrote this song after watching a man let someone drown without trying to save him. There are even stories that Collins found the man in question, invited him to a show and then singled him out in front of a sold-out audience, announcing that "In the Air Tonight" was about him before breaking into an especially vicious version.
But none of this is true, according to Collins. As he explained in a Tonight Show interview, the song was about his divorce. "Sometimes it's like, ‘I love you. Don't hang up,'" Collins said. "And sometimes it's like, ‘Well, [forget] you.' And that's where a song like [that] comes in. There's obviously a lot of anger in there."
12 | "Jump" by Van Halen
Few songs in music history have seemed as innocuous as "Jump," a song in which David Lee Roth implores us to jump a lot. Not a lot of layers going on there. But Roth revealed that the song's origins are actually much darker than anyone could have guessed.
"I was watching television one night and it was the five o'clock news and there was a fellow standing on top of the Arco Towers in Los Angeles," Roth recalled. "He was about to check out early, he was going to do the 33 stories drop. There was a whole crowd of people in the parking lot downstairs, yelling ‘Don't jump, don't jump.' And I thought to myself, ‘Jump.' So, I wrote it down and ultimately it made in onto the record."
Wow. Just like that, the song that always made us smile because it was silly good fun has become the most depressing song about suicide ever recorded.
13 | "Pretty in Pink" by The Psychedelic Furs
When John Hughes decided to base his 1986 movie about teenage love on an obscure Psychedelic Furs song, he maybe should've listened a little more closely to the lyrics. To be fair, we always thought the song was about a girl who, um… looked pretty in pink?
Not so, says Furs singer and lyricist Richard Butler, who explained that the song was "a metaphor for being naked." He goes on to explain that the girl in the song "thinks that she's wanted and in demand and clever and beautiful, but people are talking about her behind her back. That was the idea of the song. And John Hughes, bless his late heart, took it completely literally and completely overrode the metaphor altogether!" If Molly Ringwald pops into your head every time you hear this song, then you're as confused as John Hughes.
14 | "Jack & Diane" by John Mellencamp
"Jack & Diane" is about as unambiguous as songs get, except for one crucial detail. According to Mellencamp, Jack wasn't meant to be a white guy.
"This is really a song about race relationships and a white girl being with a black guy, and that's what the song's about," Mellencamp said he explained to his record company in 1982. The record execs were not impressed, and purportedly told Mellencamp, "Whoa, can't you make him something other than that?"
He eventually agreed to cut the lyrics making it explicit that Jack is African-American, and focus instead on him being a football star. Mellencamp's most successful hit single may not be remembered as a celebration of biracial relationships, but that's definitely where it began.
15 | "Cracklin' Rosie" by Neil Diamond
It was Neil Diamond's first #1 hit, and most people just assumed that Cracklin' Rosie, described in the song as a "store-bought woman" and "poor man's lady", was a prostitute. Turns out, Rosie wasn't even meant to be a person at all. Diamond revealed in a Rolling Stone interview that the song was inspired by a Native American tribe in Canada which had more men than women. "On Saturday nights when they go out, the guys all get their girl," Diamond said. But the guys who weren't able to find a girl "get a bottle of Cracklin' Rosie (instead)," he said. "That's their girl for the weekend." Some wineries even briefly sold their own version of Cracklin' Rosie wine, though it was never as popular as the song.
16 | "Margaritaville" by Jimmy Buffett
It's a song that conjures images of lazy summer days and drinking too many margaritas. But if you've ever sung along to more than the "some people claim that there's a woman to blame" part, you might've noticed that the lyrics actually paint a bleak picture. The song's narrator isn't on vacation, but "wasting away" in a beach resort community, getting tattoos he doesn't remember, looking for lost salt shakers, and drinking endless cocktails to "help me hang on." Is he aimless and depressed because of a failed relationship? It sure seems like it, and as the song unfolds, he goes from insisting "it's nobody's fault," to "hell, it could be my fault," to finally "it's my own damn fault."
17 | "Macho Man" by The Village People
When you think of the Village People song "Macho Man," two words that probably don't spring to mind are dark and serious. But that's apparently what the French songwriters had in mind, according to David Hodo, otherwise known as the construction worker. "At the time, macho had been banned from the English language by the feminist movement," Hodo says. We don't remember that being quite the case, but whatever, some people had fears that masculinity was under attack, and the world needed a song championing men who weren't afraid to dress like sexy Indians or shirtless bikers.
"When the producers pulled us together to do this, they wanted this whole thing to be very serious," Hodo says. "It was gonna be very dark and very serious." Luckily, the Village People decided there was "no way we can do this seriously" and ended up recording the campy, lighthearted version instead. But when you listen to the song again, remember that lyrics like "Every man ought to be a macho macho man/To live a life of freedom, machos make a stand" were meant without a hint of irony.
18 | "The Trees" by Rush
Fans of prog-rock legends Rush might be tempted to overanalyze a song like "The Trees." This story of "unrest in the forest," with anthropomorphic maple and oak trees battling for sunlight, sure does feel like an allegory for civil rights, or an argument for libertarian politics, or maybe a cautionary tale about the futility of war. But when Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart was asked during an interview with Modern Drummer magazine to explain the song, he said it was much, much, much simpler than any of the theories. "I saw a cartoon picture of these trees carrying on like fools," Peart said. "I thought, ‘What if trees acted like people?'" Um… that's it?
19 | "99 Luftballons" by Nena
Everything about this catchy one-hit wonder sounds like '80s synthesizer fluff. C'mon, it's a song about balloons... Ninety-nine balloons! Has there ever been a song more inconsequential? Well, if you think that, you might want to listen to it again. There's a bigger story happening in this tune than just a bunch of balloons taking flight. It was inspired by something lead singer Gabriele Kerner witnessed at a Rolling Stones concert in West Berlin during their Tattoo You tour.
"Mick Jagger released thousands of balloons at the end of the concert," she recalled. "They were all picked up by the wind and carried in the direction of East Berlin—over the Berlin Wall. I'll never forget that image." She and guitarist-lyricist Carlo Karges imagined what might happen if the balloons were mistaken for UFOs, which led to various countries shooting missiles at each other and, inevitably, a full-on nuclear war. Yes, that's right, "99 Luftballons" is about nuclear devastation caused by a innocent bundle of balloons released into the sky by Mick Jagger.
20 | "Royals" by Lorde
It's been called an anthem for millennials, a generational rejection of consumerism and materialism. "We'll never be royals," she sings. "It don't run in our blood/That kind of lux just ain't for us/We crave a different kind of buzz." Seems pretty cut-and-dried. But when the New Zealand pop singer explained the song's origins, the message was a bit more… literal.
She had apparently been flipping through an old issue of National Geographic, and happened upon a picture of "this dude signing baseballs," Lorde explained to VH1. "He was a baseball player and his shirt said Royals. I was like, I really like that word, because I'm a big word fetishist. I'll pick a word and I'll pin an idea to that." That "dude" turned out to be George Brett, former third baseman for the Kansas City Royals.
21 | "Fire and Rain" by James Taylor
The part that most people remember about this song is the "sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground" line, which sure does sound like a fatal plane crash. Was Taylor referring to a woman named Suzanne, mentioned earlier in the song for the plans made that "put an end to (her)"? It was all very mysterious, but it seemed like a love story with an unhappy ending, thanks to an airplane that crashed and killed the object of Taylor's affections. Well, you can relax, because none of that is true. The Suzanne that Taylor sings about is Suzanne Schnerr, a childhood friend of Taylor who committed suicide while he was recording his first album. As for the flying machine in pieces, it has nothing to do with an airplane. Taylor was name-dropping his former band, The Flying Machines, which ended in less than amicable terms. There was no plane crash, or at least there wasn't in this James Taylor classic.
22 | "All Star" by Smash Mouth
It's probably impossible to hear this song anymore and not think of Shrek or any of its sequels. But believe it or not, "All Star" really had nothing to do with lovable green ogres voiced by Mike Myers. There've been many theories that the Smash Mouth mega-hit was a warning about climate change. The lyrics support that claim, with lines like "It's a cool place and they say it gets colder/You're bundled up now wait 'til you get older" and "The water's getting warm so you might as well swim/My world's on fire. How about yours?" Greg Camp, the band's guitarist and songwriter, insisted that the song isn't "completely" about climate change but admitted "it has elements" and does directly address "a hole in the ozone layer and global warming."
23 | "Detroit Rock City" by KISS
The first song on Destroyer, arguably KISS's best album, is widely considered a party anthem and a tribute to the city of Detroit. But it's also a tragic tale of a teenage fan who learned too late that there are worse things than being late to a KISS concert. Lead singer Paul Stanley admitted that the the song wasn't all fist-bumping rock celebration, but was actually inspired by a real KISS fan who died in a car crash, hitting a truck in a head-on collision while speeding to make it to a show on time. "I thought, how odd and how striking and the juxtaposition of someone coming to a KISS concert, which celebrates being alive, to lose your life," Stanley recalled. "That was the twist of ‘Detroit Rock City.'" Whether this mythical fan death actually happened has been the subject of much debate, and one devoted sleuth is still trying to identify the accident that may've inspired the song.
24 | "Wonderful Tonight" by Eric Clapton
Clapton has never been so syrupy sweet as in this love ballad to his future wife Pattie Boyd, also known as ex-Mrs. George Harrison and the woman who once had Clapton "on his knees" in "Layla."
But while this tune doesn't seem to be anything but unabashed adoration — does Clapton do anything but tell his lady friend that she looks wonderful and she is wonderful and he loves her so very much? — Boyd once claimed that just listening to this song could be "torture".
What is that all about? Rumor has it that "Wonderful Tonight" was written when Boyd and Clapton were getting ready to attend a party hosted by friends Paul and Linda McCartney, a celebration of Buddy Holly's birthday. Boyd was taken longer than usual to get ready, and every time she tried on a new outfit, Clapton said, "You look wonderful. Can we please go now?" He eventually grew bored of waiting, and picked up a guitar and wrote "Wonderful Tonight" on the spot, as a sarcastic paean to Boyd's inability to make a decision.
25 | "I Will Always Love You" by Dolly Parton
It's hard to listen to this Parton classic—made famous by Whitney Houston in the early 90s—and not think it's about a romantic relationship coming to an end. But when Parton originally wrote it in 1973, she meant it as a farewell to her mentor and longtime singing partner Porter Wagoner. She played it for him as a way of breaking the news that she was about to go solo and their professional relationship was over. Or as Parton explained it years later, "It's saying, ‘Just because I'm going don't mean I wont love you. I appreciate you and I hope you do great and I appreciate everything you've done, but I'm out of here.'"
26 | "Losing My Religion" by R.E.M.
You would think that a song with a title like "Losing My Religion" would at least be tangentially about religion. But R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe told The New York Times that the song had nothing to do with losing faith in his spiritual beliefs. It was an old Southern saying, he claimed, "the same as being at the end of your rope or reaching the final straw and snapping." He compared it to something a waitress might say when dealing with annoying customers: "I almost lost my religion over that table, they were such jerks." That still doesn't explain why he thought he heard us laughing, and then thought he heard us sing. Is that also an old Southern saying? We're afraid to ask. All we know is that we'll never be able to hear this song again without thinking of a very annoyed waitress.
27 | "Rich Girl" by Hall & Oates
This may be the most shocking revelation of this list. The rich girl in the Hall & Oates song "Rich Girl" was in fact… are you sure you want to know this?... a man.
That's right, it was "written about a guy who was the heir to a fast-food fortune," Oates admitted several years ago. "Obviously, because Daryl is really smart, he realized that ‘Rich Girl' sounded better than ‘Rich Guy.'"
The flesh and blood subject of "Rich Girl" was a guy named Victor Walker, an ex-boyfriend of a friend of Hall and Oates, whose dad owned fifteen KFC franchises. We don't know about you, but this is going to take some time for us to digest. It'd be like finding out that the Prince song "Darling Nikki" is really about a guy named Nicholas.
28 | "Mother and Child Reunion" by Paul Simon
It was the first big hit for Paul Simon as a solo artist, and the title came, as he admitted in a Rolling Stone interview, from a menu. "I was eating in a Chinese restaurant downtown," Simon said. "There was a dish called ‘Mother and Child Reunion.' It's chicken and eggs. And I said, ‘Oh, I love that title. I gotta use that one.'" We're not sure if that gives a new meaning to the "only a motion away" line, but we're not sure what to think anymore.
29 | "One" by U2
Whatever your interpretation of this U2 song, it's probably wrong. There have been all kinds of explanations, offered by fans and the band alike, and they've all been wildly different. Some have suggested that it's about the band feeling fractured, or the Edge's marital problems, or Bono's memories of his troubled relationship with his dad after the death of his mom. The only thing Bono will say with any certainty about the song is that it's "a bit twisted, which is why I could never figure out why people want it at their weddings. I have certainly met a hundred people who've had it at their weddings. I tell them, ‘Are you mad? It's about splitting up!'"
30 | "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" by Green Day
Nobody seems to remember that the song is actually called "Good Riddance" and that the "Time of Your Life" part is actually in parentheses. As singer/songwriter Billie Joe Armstrong has explained, it's about a bad breakup. His girlfriend was moving to Ecuador and he wasn't exactly happy about it. "In the song, I tried to be level-headed about her leaving, even though I was completely pissed off," Armstrong explained. And yet, for the end of time, this song will be included in montages trying to be wistfully nostalgic and romantic, in which the "Good Riddance" part will be ignored and the "I hope you had the time of your life" line will be repeated without bitterness.
