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50 free Lyric trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
40 free Lyric trivia questions with answers. Lyric trivia usually means finishing a line. This quiz asks the better question: where did the line come from? Why does a Nirvana song take its title from a deodorant, why did the FBI spend two years investigating a garage-rock single, and which superstar hit was written as a goodbye letter to a business partner? The forty questions cover misheard lyrics and their proper name, songs whose meanings were spectacularly misread by politicians, words scribbled on a friend's wall, a nursery school drawing, and the numbers behind them all: verses drafted, weeks at number one, minutes of running time. Every answer was checked against an encyclopaedic or primary source, and each question carries the sentence that establishes it, so nobody has to settle an argument by shouting. Ideal for a music round, a car journey, or anyone who has ever confidently sung the wrong words in public.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the proper name for a misheard lyric?
A mondegreen
Sylvia Wright coined it in a 1954 Harper's essay after mishearing a Scottish ballad as a child.
Q 02The term for a misheard lyric came from a child hearing 'laid him on the green' as what?
Lady Mondegreen
The ballad was 'The Bonnie Earl o' Moray', printed in Thomas Percy's collection of 1765.
Q 03In 'Purple Haze', Jimi Hendrix asks to be excused while he kisses what?
The sky
The mishearing is so famous that Hendrix played up to it on stage, pointing at his bassist as he sang the line.
Q 04Creedence Clearwater Revival's 'Bad Moon Rising' is endlessly misheard as warning about what?
A bathroom on the right
John Fogerty eventually started singing the wrong version live, on the grounds that everyone else already was.
Q 05Which 1963 garage-rock single triggered an FBI investigation into its supposedly obscene words?
Louie Louie
The lyrics were innocuous but nearly unintelligible; the investigation ended with no prosecution and made the record a classic.
Q 06Who wrote and first recorded that song, back in 1956?
Richard Berry
He built it on the tune of 'El Loco Cha Cha', one of the clearest Afro-Cuban fingerprints in American pop.
Q 07Which 17th-century Italian astronomer is named in the words of 'Bohemian Rhapsody'?
Galileo Galilei
Producer Roy Thomas Baker said every new take of that name meant splicing another length of tape onto the reel.
Q 08What is structurally unusual about 'Bohemian Rhapsody' for a hit single?
It has no chorus
Freddie Mercury called the result a mock opera, stitched together from three separate songs he had written.
Q 09Which Arabic exclamation, meaning 'in the name of God', appears in that same operatic section?
Bismillah
Rival factions shout it while fighting over the narrator's soul, between the thunderbolts and the very very frightening lightning.
Q 10In Don McLean's 'American Pie', 'the day the music died' refers to what?
A 1959 plane crash
The crash killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, and the phrase became the popular name for it afterwards.
Q 11How long is the full recording of 'American Pie'?
8 minutes 42 seconds
That made it, at the time, the sixth longest song ever to enter the Billboard Hot 100.
Q 12Which pop star took a shortened 'American Pie' to number one in at least 15 countries in 2000?
Madonna
McLean's own recording went into the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress in 2017.
Q 13Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' takes its title from what?
A brand of deodorant
Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill wrote 'Kurt smells like Teen Spirit' on his wall in marker; he took it as a revolutionary slogan.
Q 21Bruce Springsteen's 'Born in the U.S.A.' is narrated by whom?
A Vietnam veteran
Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan both mistook the anthemic chorus for flag-waving and tried to borrow it.
Q 22Who wrote 'I Will Always Love You'?
Dolly Parton
It was a farewell to her mentor Porter Wagoner as she went solo, cut at RCA Studio B in Nashville in June 1973.
Q 23How long did Whitney Houston's version stay at number one on the Hot 100?
Fourteen weeks
It was a record at the time and made her the first female artist with a diamond-certified single.
Q 14Which band's loud-quiet dynamics did Kurt Cobain say he was trying to copy in that song?
The Pixies
He described the attempt as writing 'the ultimate pop song', which is not how most people file the result.
Q 15'Hey Jude' began life as 'Hey Jules', written to comfort which child?
Julian Lennon
Paul McCartney wrote it after John Lennon left the boy's mother, and it became the first single on the Beatles' own Apple label.
Q 16What chart record did 'Hey Jude' set in Britain?
Longest single to top the charts
Its seven-plus minutes, most of them that repeated coda, spawned a decade of imitators trying the same trick.
Q 17John Lennon always denied that the initials in 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' stood for what?
LSD
He credited the imagery to Lewis Carroll instead, particularly the chapter of Through the Looking-Glass where Alice drifts in a boat.
Q 18What actually gave that Beatles song its title?
A nursery school drawing
It depicted a classmate called Lucy Vodden, and Lennon liked the caption enough to build a song around it.
Q 19'Every Breath You Take' is sung from whose point of view?
A possessive lover
Couples still choose it for first dances, which Sting has spent forty years politely pointing out is a mistake.
Q 20At whose Jamaican writing desk did Sting begin that song?
Ian Fleming
The desk was at Goldeneye in Oracabessa Bay, where James Bond had been written three decades earlier.
Q 24Who wrote 'Nothing Compares 2 U', years before Sinead O'Connor made it famous?
Prince
He gave it to his side project The Family in 1985, where it sat on an album nobody bought until 1990.
Q 25Who wrote and first recorded 'Respect', two years before Aretha Franklin's version?
Otis Redding
Franklin rearranged and rephrased it in 1967, and it became a second-wave feminist anthem rather than a man's plea.
Q 26'Sweet Home Alabama' was written as a reply to songs by which artist?
Neil Young
Lynyrd Skynyrd objected to 'Southern Man' and 'Alabama' blaming the whole South, and name-checked him in the lyrics.
Q 27'Puff, the Magic Dragon' began as whose poem?
Leonard Lipton's
He was a 19-year-old Cornell student in 1959; Yarrow later hunted him down to give him a credit and a share.
Q 28Iron Butterfly's 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' is a slurred version of which phrase?
In the Garden of Eden
Doug Ingle had worked through a gallon of wine before playing it to the drummer, who wrote down what he thought he heard.
Q 29Which Christmas hymn is quoted inside that same track?
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
Ingle wanted to 'touch the spiritual'; the drum solo, meanwhile, nods to the Congolese Missa Luba.
Q 30Why did Billboard remove 'Old Town Road' from its Hot Country Songs chart in 2019?
It did not fit the genre
The ruling started a public argument about what counts as country music, and the Billy Ray Cyrus remix answered it commercially.