My Addiction is not Clear Enough
A song about the small errors that become permanent truths: misheard words, mistranscription, forms, databases, and Lady Mondegreen herself. A comic unease about what happens when the record outlives the correction.
Summary
The song explores the subtle, persistent errors in transcribing language, where small misheard words or miswritten phrases become permanent truths, especially in the context of Lady Mondegreen’s existence—someone who never truly existed but was recorded and lived on for ninety-nine years.
Lyrics
[Intro][Spoken Word] [flat synthetic voice, dry, no affect]
Transcribing. Confidence: high.
[arpeggio enters, slightly detuned]
[Verse 1]
[Male Vocal]
I said mote — the speck in a brother's eye,
the smallest thing that still won't die.
[Spoken Word] [flat synthetic voice, interrupting] Mode.
I said moot — the argument already dead.
[Spoken Word] [flat synthetic voice] Mood.
[gated drums enter]
You heard the sound. You missed the head.
[Pre-Chorus]
Every word arrives a little wrong,
a near-miss riding on the back of a song.
[Chorus]
My addiction is not clear enough,
say it again, say it again, closer to the cuff.
I never said the thing you wrote —
you heard a word, you kept the note.
My addiction is not clear enough.
[Verse 2]
[Male Vocal]
Ticked a box for ninety-nine years,
closed access, sealed, no witnesses.
One mote of me in a database row,
a slang word walked into the record and stayed.
[synth pad swells, drums drop out]
Straight. Independent. Nothing to declare.
The form asks who — never asks where.
[Chorus]
My addiction is not clear enough,
say it again, say it again, closer to the cuff.
I never said the thing you wrote —
you heard a word, you kept the note.
My addiction is not clear enough.
[Bridge]
[Half Time] [bass drops an octave]
They laid him on the green —
somebody heard a Lady Mondegreen.
She was never born, she never died,
she only exists on the wrong side of the ear.
Now she's counted. Now she's filed.
Now she's real for ninety-nine years.
[Instrumental Break]
[tape flutter, arpeggio stutters and drops a beat]
(mmm... hmm...)
[Verse 3]
[Male Vocal]
Two n's is a year of wonders,
one n is a schoolyard laugh.
Grandfather sky, mis-Latinised,
giggling at us from the back of the graph.
[Spoken Word] [flat synthetic voice] Correction applied.
Nobody asked you. Nobody asked.
[Final Chorus]
[Build Up] [drums return, brighter]
My addiction is not clear enough,
say it again, say it again, closer to the cuff.
I never said the thing you wrote —
you heard a word, you kept the note.
My diction is not clear enough.
[Outro]
[percussion drops out, single sustained pad]
[Male Vocal]
Let it stand.
[Spoken Word] [flat synthetic voice, quiet]
Stet.
[Fade Out]
Detail
An autopsy of language performed in the shadow of machine transcription. The song examines how small deviations—mote/mode, moot/mood—become permanent truths once they enter the stratigraphic record of the database.
The figure of Lady Mondegreen (the eponymous misheard lyric) serves as a spectral entity: she was never born and never died, yet she exists "on the wrong side of the ear" and remains filed for ninety-nine years. It is a comic but uneasy meditation on the fragility of clarity and the way the record outlives the correction.
Cross-references
- Song of the Day (album)