I Would Survive Lyrics

Where to Actually Find the Real I Would Survive Lyrics

I spent about six hours last week trying to track down the original Gloria Gaynor version lyrics because a client needed them for a sync licensing project, and I honestly forgot how much garbage is floating around the internet. Most lyric sites have misattributed lines, wrong punctuation, and sometimes entire verses that don't exist. I found maybe three sources that actually got it right, and even then I had to cross-reference with the album version from "Love Tracks" (1978) because the single edit trims some lines. The main thing people get wrong is the bridge. A lot of sites will paste the pre-chorus into the bridge section, and if you're just copying and pasting without checking, you'll miss the actual lyrical shift that happens after "I would survive, I would survive." That second "I would survive" sits in a completely different melodic phrase than the first one, and knowing that distinction matters if you're doing transcription work or timing analysis for any kind of production use.

I Would Survive Lyrics

Here is the working transcript I ended up with after checking the master recording against the official published sheet music. This is the standard version, not the extended dance mix which has additional ad-libs in the final minute: I'm sitting here waiting for the phone to ring
Wondering if he's ever going to call again
I'm wondering what kind of fool I've become
You always used to call and now I hear nothing

I'm trying not to think about all the bad times
I remember we had so many happy times
How could I be so blind to see
That you never really loved me

Well, I would survive
I would survive
I would survive

Now he's gone and left me standing on my own
I wish I'd been smart enough to keep him from going
I thought that he would come back
To make everything alright again

Well, I would survive
I would survive
I would survive

Well, now he's gone and left me standing on my own
I wish I'd been smart enough to keep him from going
I thought that he would come back
To make everything alright again

Oh, I would survive
I would survive
I would survive

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
I would survive
I would survive
I would survive The Delta Goodrem cover from 2003 has slightly altered phrasing in the second verse — she drops "You always used to call and now I hear nothing" and replaces it with her own variation. If you're comparing versions for a media project, that's a common trap. The original Gaynor vocal is the one licensed by most publishers, and the publishing rights are split between multiple administrators depending on territory, which makes clearing the lyrics more annoying than usual.

What nobody tells you about lyric research is that MIDI files and early Karaoke CDs from the late 90s sometimes have their own unofficial word substitutions that get replicated across thousands of sites. I caught one major site that had "I'm wondering what kind of fool I've become" changed to "I'm wondering what kind of fool I have become" and it had been copied from a 1999 karaoke release that slightly altered the grammar. The original recording clearly says "I've become," not "I have become," and you can verify that in under thirty seconds if you pull up the album track on YouTube or any streaming platform with the lyrics feature enabled. For a proper download of a clean text version, the best sources are usually the official publisher's website or licensed lyric databases like LyricFind or MusicNotes. Free lyric aggregator sites tend to have ads injected into the middle of the text, broken line breaks, and occasionally missing stanzas because they scrape from each other rather than checking primary sources. I usually recommend just pulling the text directly from the music streaming service's built-in lyrics player — Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal all have sync APIs that match the lyrics to the audio timeline, which catches errors in real time. One edge case that bit me once: the live performance versions from Gaynor's concert DVDs sometimes omit the final repeated "I would survive" chorus entirely, and a few lyric sites that pulled from those recordings listed the song as having a shorter structure. If your project requires the full duration of lyrical content, always default to the studio album master and note the source in your documentation. It saves a headache later when someone asks where the missing verse went.

There's also a Korean cover by Girls' Generation from 2011 that changes the entire lyrical content rather than translating it, and an Indonesian version by Chrisye that uses entirely different words. None of these affect the original English lyrics, but if you're doing a comprehensive research project that covers international versions, you'll want to separate them clearly in your notes or the confusion becomes real. The Gloria Gaynor track was written by Howard Keystone and Robert Rans, and the publishing information is managed through several different entities depending on whether you need mechanical licensing, sync licensing, or print rights. That's mostly relevant if you're actually using the lyrics commercially rather than just looking them up for personal reasons, but it's worth knowing upfront if you plan to go past the basic lyric reading stage.