Story about this misheard lyric by: Rachel

'Dear Joan' is a song written in the form of a letter from an abusive man to his girlfriend or wife. The stanzas are all about the different ways he mistreated her and his thoughts on the way he treated her, and the chorus--we thought--started with the same chilling lines: 'Dear Joan, I won't ever say that I'm sorry for the screaming last night, and the nights before.' The song petrified us. We couldn't imagine anyone so cold-blooded that he could perfectly analyze the way he beat his girlfriend and the effects it had on both their lives and then promptly turn around and say he wasn't sorry about it.

Well, one day we were all listening to that song--we were in a very emotionally masochistic mood, and it really is a beautiful song to boot (disturbingly enough), so it seemed very appropriate. Suddenly, someone who had never heard it before piped up, 'That's kind of sweet. He's trying to apologize to her.' We all looked at the girl as if she was crazy. She just blinked a few times and said, 'What? It's in the chorus. 'Dear Joan, I wanted to say that I'm sorry for the screaming last night and the nights before.''

We stared at her for another minute, but listened dutifully the next time the chorus came around. Sure enough, Rob Thomas was crooning, 'I wanted to say,' not 'I won't ever say.' We were so humiliated. All this time, we'd been completely misinterpreting that song! We'd misheard one word, and that word had changed the entire meaning of the song for us. We'd absolutely loathed Joan's nameless boyfriend before, but now we almost felt ourselves feeling sorry for the jerk. It was insane.

ok, so that's not so much of a funny story as an interesting one. ; ) But I like it.