35) Heat Waves

Hello and welcome to Learning English with Lyrics, I am your host Jake, and today we are going to talk about some lyrics from the song "Heat Waves" by Glass Animals. Before we get to that, I just want to say thank you to everyone who has been listening to the podcast! If you're enjoying it, please tell your friends about it, that helps us out a lot!


Alright, let's jump into the song!

This song is primarily about a person, the singer, thinking about a friend or perhaps a former romantic partner. It seems as though that they are a bit sad about this thought. I think we've all felt something close to that.  Thinking about, or reminiscing about an old friend or girlfriend or boyfriend. It's pretty relatable.

What I want to focus on today is a line from the chorus. The chorus goes "Sometimes, all I think about is you. Late nights in the middle of June. Heat waves been fakin' me out. Can't make you happier now."

I thought this song was appropriate as I'm recording this in the middle of June, although thankfully I'm not recording it late at night.

The line I want to talk about today is "Heat waves been fakin' me out."

Now the first thing we need to address is the grammar. Like many songs, the grammatical structure here is incorrect. But that's okay! It works. However, if we're going to talk about English, we need to do it correctly. Can you see the problem with it?

It should say "Heat waves *have* been faking me out." We can't just say "been" by itself like that. We need to pair it with the word "have". This particular verb form is called the "present perfect continuous". You don't need to remember that, but you do need to remember what it means. When you see "have been", that means that the thing doing the action did something in the past, and is continuing it in the present time. In this case, Heat waves are the thing and they've faked him out in the past, and are continuing to do so in the present time.

So what exactly is a "heat wave". Well, it could be one of two things. Generally, when you hear the words "heat wave", it means that the weather has gotten exceptionally hot, over a period of days. 99% of the time you hear it, that is what it will mean.

Unfortunately, our song falls into the 1%. In this case, our singer is not talking about the weather, but an actual thing caused by the heat. When the weather is extremely hot, sometimes you can see "waves" of heat, changing or distorting the air. It can make you think there is water, somewhere that there is not water. In the desert, we call these a "mirage". It's not actually water, but extreme heat.

That's what our singer is talking about here. He's seeing mirages, and they are "faking him out". To be "faked out" is to be tricked. To think something false.

In this case, the heat waves are making him think that he's seeing something that he is not.

But we can be "faked out" by other things too. For example, if you told me you'd bought me a box of donuts, but instead it was a box of broccoli, you would have "faked me out".

So, our singer has been "faked out" by these heat waves. He thinks that he sees this person that he misses, or perhaps sees something that reminds him of them.

Well, that's all we have for today. I hope that you'll join us next time! As always, you can reach out to us anytime at [email protected] or on Instagram at lelpodcast! We hope to hear from you soon!