Who Sings That? When Listeners Guess (Really) Wrong

My wife and I were both working from home. As she passed my office, she said, “I’m closing the door so you can listen to your screaming hair bands.” The song playing at the moment was actually “Madman’s Eyes,” the recent Triple-A charter from the Dave Matthews Band, usually one of her favorite acts.

Out of context, it wasn’t a completely left-field assessment. I had just been thinking that only artist image separated that song from today’s Active Rock chart titles. When I tweeted the story, Craig Rosen responded, “The new single that kinda sounds like Led Zeppelin?” Plus, any song played at a volume loud enough to disturb workday concentration sounds like hard rock screeching to the distracted.

Ross on Radio readers had a lot of stories of songs they initially took to be by somebody else. Often, the similarity was intentional or oft-observed. Badfinger as the Beatles. John Cafferty for Springsteen. All-4-One as Boyz II Men. Laura Branigan as Donna Summer. Lauren Daigle’s “You Say” as Adele. Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing” as Bob Dylan. Both Edwyn Collns’s “A Girl Like You” and Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” as David Bowie (and not Billy Idol, for whom the latter song was written).

The unlikely guesses are more fun, though, and sometimes more telling. In 1978, when punk was still something he had only heard about, my younger brother walked in as I was listening to “Baby Baby” by the UK band the Vibrators. “Is that Kiss?” he asked. It wasn’t intended as a compliment. Kiss was his go-to reference at the time for anything rocking he didn’t like. 

I liked “Baby Baby” because it was a bubblegummy throwback that just happened to be by a punk act. I would’ve probably gone for the Sweet or a ’60s garage act, but Kiss had some of both in their DNA. As it happened, “I Was Made for Loving You,” intended as disco bandwagon-jumping, influenced Duran Duran and thus gave Kiss an unintended footprint in new wave.

In the early ’80s, I was visiting my grandparents in Houston and I had Oldies KNUZ on. Our mutually agreeable arrangement was that I had the run of the car radio. My granddad had the right to make fun of anything I was listening to. But I feel reasonably certain that he would have not started singing atonally to mock the song on the radio if he had taken just a little longer to recognize it as the somewhat-out-of-place “Old Cape Cod” by Patti Page. 

I think Radio & Records’ Jeff Green and Ron Rodrigues had already told me they were listening to the just-released “Hold Me Now” by the Thompson Twins for the first time. They were excited about discovering a smash. I thought it sounded like Barry Manilow. That came off as dismissive, but I really heard a vocal similarity. Besides, it was the time in Manilow’s career when he was trying anything to get another hit. It would have made perfect sense for Clive Davis to ask a hotter Arista act for a song. And “Hold Me Now” was a sharp turn into AC territory for the Twins.

Some similarly wild guesses from readers:

• “At first, I thought ‘All I Need Is a Miracle’ by Mike + the Mechanics was Barry Manilow making a comeback” – George Nicholas
• “The studio version of ‘Coming Up’ sounded nothing like Paul McCartney. My best guess was that Kool & the Gang were singing ‘Camille’”—Joe Persek
• “I first thought Maxi Priest’s ‘Close to You’ was a Hall & Oates song, with Oates on the verses”—Marc Weisblott
• “The first time I heard ‘I Saw Red’ by Warrant, I was positive it was a new song by Howard Jones. Then the bridge kicked in” – Josh Hosler
• “I was 15, on a bus listening to a transistor radio and I heard ‘Indiana Wants Me.’ I assumed it was Simon & Garfunkel. A bit more obscure, but in spring ’86, Alternative WLIR Long Island, N.Y., played Sandie Shaw’s ‘Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken’ and I thought it sounded like Olivia Newton-John” – Mike Schaefer
• “I thought ‘Welcome to the Boomtown’ by David & David was Bad Company”—Todd Fisher
• “I thought Bryan Hyland’s ‘Gypsy Woman’ was Van Morrison”—Scott Lowe
• “The first time I heard ‘Black Hole Sun,’ I honestly thought it was a new Billy Joel song, and he was trying to be edgy” – Ken Bays (Justin Rugnetta thought it was Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” that sounded like Joel.)
• “I thought U2’s ‘With or Without You’ was some audacious new move on Neil Diamond’s part. Then Bono’s voice started soaring, and there was no doubt who it really was” – Adam Sobolak
• “I always thought ‘Can’t You See’ by Marshall Tucker Band was actually the Who”—Craig Michaels
• “I worked with a guy who thought Steve Miller Band’s ‘Abracadabra’ was Abba”—Paul Ciliano.
• “John Stewart sounded like Johnny Cash on the song ‘Gold.’”—Derik Gendvil
• “At 12-years-old, I swore that Hamilton, Joe Frank, and Reynolds sounded exactly like Elvis on ‘Don’t Pull Your Love.’”—Rayne
• “I’m a Gen-Z’er who has loved older music since the day I was born. When I first heard ‘Piece of My Heart’ by Big Brother and the Holding Company as a kid, I thought Janis Joplin sounded like Pat Benatar”—Noah Bliese. 

Some of the most interesting misidentifications have to do with what artists are hot at the time.

• Jay Philpott heard Gregg Allman’s “I’m No Angel” as John Mellencamp. Wink Sterrett thought it was Bruce Springsteen. If you were trying to sound like what you heard on rock radio in 1987, you could have ended up copying either. 
• Similarly, Donald Blese thought “I Saw the Light” sounded like Carole King, but soon Mike Mesic thought Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” was Rundgren. (Then again, “You Get What You Give” reminded many people of Rundgren years after he had mostly disappeared from the radio.)

New artists are always fair game for misidentifications because they offer fewer context clues. Reed Bunzel hadn’t heard of David Gray when he thought that Bob Dylan was singing “Babylon.” In spring ’75, I thought the British retro-R&B homages “Sad Sweet Dreamer” and “Up in a Puff of Smoke” were the Jackson 5 and a reunited Diana Ross & the Supremes respectively. I couldn’t have possibly deduced the brand-new Sweet Sensation (the ’70s one, not the ’80s act) without knowing about them. I might have recognized Polly Brown from Pickettywitch, but I’d never heard their one minor U.S. hit.  

Most of our stories here involve older titles. In part, that’s because there are fewer occasions when ROR readers are likely to hear a song the first time entirely without context. Most new songs have been serviced directly to them. The others are unlikely to be encountered without metadata. 

That said, for the last decade, there’s been another sort of cross-pollination. where acts have had both their own format-specific hits and their second life of guest appearances for EDM artists/producers. Suddenly, wildly disparate acts are supposed to sound like each other. In this festival/“no silos” era, the notion of comically misidentifying an artist might be less comical to younger readers.