Lyric Swap

So you're listening to a song by a band you like. They get to the chorus, and maybe you're singing along because you've picked it up over the first few times. But wait—what did they just sing? That was different, wasn't it? And it changed the meaning quite a bit. That was a Lyric Swap.

A Lyric Swap is essentially a repeated song lyric that gets changed in one of its iterations. It's not quite Lyrical Dissonance, because the lyrics generally match the tone, but maybe in one verse they sing a line slightly different, and it's a significantly different meaning.

Not to be confused with a Mondegreen, which is unintentional.


 * In "Poker Face", Lady Gaga slips in "fuck her face" during the chorus instead of the Title Drop.
 * In "July, July!", the line "the water rolls down the drain" changes to "the blood rolls down the drain" for one refrain.
 * The final verse of Nickelback's Figured You Out: Chad Kroeger repeats the first verse, but replace "love" with "hate".
 * In The Sharpest Lives, from My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade, the standard line in the chorus is "Burn all the empires" (rhyming with "vampires" in the next line), but the final one uses "Burn all the embers" (rhyming with the previous lines of "shot to remember" and "I will surrender"). The song is about drug use, the line change perhaps implying that the singer is "burned out"?
 * The final verse of Queen's "One Vision" ends with "Just gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, fried chicken". Bit of a different meaning.
 * In "Twentieth Century Boy," Marc transposes the words "boy" and "toy" in the last two refrains.
 * The last repetition of the chorus in The Offspring's "You're Gonna Go Far Kid" replaces "With a thousand lies and a good disguise" with "Clever alibis, lord of the flies."
 * The narrator of Nick Cave's "The Mercy Seat" (about a man on death row) insists that he is innocent ("And anyway I told the truth"). The chorus always ends with the lines "And I am not afraid to die," until the last time it is sung, when the line is changed to "But I'm afraid I told a lie."
 * Eric Idle's famous song from Monty Python's Life of Brian, Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life, notably does, replacing the eponymous lyrics of the chorus by "Always look on the bright side of death/Just before you draw your terminal breath".
 * "Spirit Never Die" by Masterplan has an 8-line chorus and is repeated three times. 5 lines are subtly changed on the second iteration. Then, 2 lines are changed, and 3 lines are reverted on the third iteration. Oh, did you want to sing along?
 * In Devo's classic song "Jocko Homo" the line "Are we not men?" changes to "Are we not pins?" as a reference to the earlier lyric, "We're pinheads all."
 * The Beatles' "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" has it's last verse repeated twice, and the second time there's a slight change, famously resulting in Molly working at the market place with the children and Desmond staying at home and putting on makeup instead of the other way around. Paul McCartney had flubbed the lyrics and they decided to Throw It In.
 * Famously, about half the time in the studio version of She Loves You, they're actually singing 'she'd love to', as in 'have sex'.
 * For most of it's running time, NOFX's "Please Play This Song On The Radio" is a Self-Demonstrating Song about how radio-friendly the song itself is. Then after a Fake-Out Fade-Out, there's one last verse, which throws in some obscenities and mentions that if someone is playing the song on the radio at this moment, they'd better have switched to the next song by now... So of course the final chorus changes from "please play this song on the radio" to "You can't play this song on the radio".
 * In the last chorus of They Might Be Giants' "Man It's So Loud In Here", "When they stop the drum machine and I can think again" becomes "When they start the love machine and I can love again".
 * The first two choruses of "Last to Know" by Three Days Grace are, like the verses, about mourning the loss of a woman who abruptly left the singer for another man. In the last chorus, the singer decides he's better off without her, the relationship wasn't all that great, and warns his ex's current lover that she'll end up treating him the same way.
 * REM's "The One I Love" alters the third verse so that "another prop has occupied my time", rather than "a simple prop to occupy my time".
 * "Heart of Glass" by Blondie, the line "Soon turned out had a heart of glass" the third time around is changed to "Soon turned out to be a pain in the ass" (but not in the radio version).
 * On the 'Garage Flower' album version of the Stone Roses' song 'Here It Comes', Ian Brown changes the lyrics from 'I'm just useless for her' to 'I'm a useless fucker'.
 * Steven Tyler of Aerosmith likes to swap lyrics quite often during live performances. Well-known live lyric swaps include "Dream until your balls turn blue" in the place of "Dream until your dreams come true" in "Dream On," "That makes a dead man rise" instead of "That makes a grown man cry" in "Back in the Saddle," and "Just give me some head" as opposed to "Just give me a kiss" in "Walk This Way."