Piano Bar Spanish (Fried Chicken?)

Have you ever noticed that, wherever you go in the world, there's always a local, playing piano in a bar, singing songs in something that sounds a lot like English, but not quite.

A lot of these guys are very talented musicians,and many play more than one instrument, piano, guitar, flute.
I'd imagine that a lot of them are self-taught, playing by ear.

The only problem is that they have learned the song lyrics the same way!
Rather than going out and buying the lyrics (or, nowadays, just downloading them from the Internet) they must have just listened to the songs over and over, until they memorised them.

Consequently, they often don't quite get the words right. Sometimes it's just missing syllables (so you get 'luhh' instead of 'love') sometimes it's just the wrong word altogether.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticising.
It's not always easy for the English speakers to catch all the lyrics of a song (Did Freddie Mercury really sing 'fried chicken' part way through 'One Vision'? That's what it sounded like to me)

I just want to illustrate how easy it is to get lost in a phrase or sentence, because what you heard wasn't what someone said.
Or, in this case, sang.

I was listening, today, to a CD I picked up in Havana last year. It was recorded by a local group called Cuarteto San Miguel (although, when we saw them, in La Pergola restaurant on Calle Obispo, they were a 5-piece, with the addition of an excellent flautist)
I was singing along, as best I could, to a song called 'Buscando la felicidad', when I stopped, and realised that whatI was singing didn't actually make sense.

The line sounded like 'Vayaste, mujer. vayaste'
I can see now where my logic went wrong.
The song continues with lyrics like 'tienes que llorar, tienes que sufrir'
Now, if he wants the woman to cry, and suffer, it's reasonable to expect that he also wants her to leave.
'I want you to leave' is 'quiero que te vayas' - see where I'm going 'te vayas' vs 'vayas te'?
All well and good, except that the imperative positive conjuction of the verb 'ir', for 'tú', is simply 've'. So 'go away' is 've te' (and can be followed by a variety of other words and phrases, in varying degrees of obscenity) and not 'vayas te'

Thinking that this might be a colloquial or alternate method of saying the same thing, I posted a query on the forums at SpanishDict.com (http://www.spanishdict.com/answers)
I had an answer within 5 minutes!

What was actually being sung was 'Fallaste, mujer, fallaste', 'you failed (or got it wrong) woman' and was in the preterite tense, not the imperative.

So, all this goes to prove two points
Listening practise is VERY important.
It's all very well being able to start a conversation in Spanish if you can't follow what the other person is saying. If what you're hearing doesn't make sense, it likely that it's not what they're saying.
Secondly, never be afraid to ask, if you're unsure. The forums at SpanishDict are just one of many sites where people are pleased to help other learners.

Finally, here's a tiny clip I recorded of the aforementioned group, live in Havana.