Liam Finn and the Silver Scroll lyrical stuff-up

The Silver Scroll Awards exist to reward and celebrate excellence in song-writing.

All sorts of names are in the mix this year including Julia Deans, Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Grand Rapids.

Then there's Liam Finn, with his wonderful dreamy song ‘Cold Feet’. It's a wonderful song from a wonderful human being (heck, he agreed to cameo in a human centipede with Suzanne Paul that's now been viewed 130,000 times, so he's OK with me).

But according to Finn, the ‘Cold Feet’ was entered into the competition with the wrong lyrics. I asked him about it on Twitter, to which he just replied "A whole bunch were wrong. They were taken from some lyric website and submitted to APRA".

I jumped onto Google and googled the lyrics for ‘Cold Feet’. Surely enough, a bunch of lyrics are wrong, including the line "Acting like a nervous tic", instead of "Acting like a nervous teen".

I rewatched the video to make sure I hadn't heard wrong myself, but surely enough, Finn definitely says “teen”. I got my colleague Dan to check this, too. "Definitely teen," he replied, in his gruff manly voice.

As the Silver Scrolls are essentially a song-writing award, I find this a fairly interesting situation. It's got me thinking about how these things are judged exactly, and whether a few different words here and there would make a difference. Tic or teen? I mean, a "nervous tic" on its own makes sense - although I've never seen Finn's face give an involuntary eyebrow twitch or lip sneer. Then again, I haven't spent too much time staring at the hairy man (I will make sure I do so next time I see him).

Taken as a whole sentence however, "Acting like a nervous tic" makes less sense, unless these fictitious lyrics were referring to a tick like you might find on a cat. They can be very nervous, especially when a cat's just been given tick treatment (for your interest, the common New Zealand tick is known as Ixodes Holocylus, although there are around 70 different types in Australasia).

Now while "acting like a nervous teen" contains the same number of syllables and therefore sounds just as nice when sung, "teen" makes more lyrical sense as teens are more prone to nervousness than ticks. I'm not even sure ticks have a brain to be properly nervous with.

Then there's the whole feeling the two words create, which has potential, I'd argue, to change the mood of the entire song. I mean, compare and contrast these two images that will be in your consciousness for the rest of the song, depending on what word is utilised:

TEEN:

TICK: