How is Lenny Kravitz pronuncing this sentence?

Question

Maybe, this is a strange question. Maybe not the place...

In the song titled "Are you gonna go my way", you can find the same sentence being pronounced too fast for me. I think I know how to pronounce that sentence, but I can not match it to the song. I mean, he speaks something like "either go my way", but that is not what people say he says...

Well, could somebody, please, explain to me how we go from "are you gonna go my way" to something like "either go my way"?

Here a link to youtube, find it at 1:05.

EDIT: I finally got it thanks to both of you and this link. It helped a lot to be able to see his mouth with a careful explanation of the pronunciation. Also, I slowed it down 50% and then back to normal speed. Thanks again!

Answer 1

Firstly, as a native speaker the line is clearly "Are you gonna go my way?".

Often in songs, one syllable will correspond to one note. In this case, both "are you" and "gonna" correspond to one note each while having two syllables. This makes the singing twice as fast as the other words ("go my way").

1. "are you" is pronounced /ˈɑ.jə/ because the word "you" is not emphasised. Normally in American speech "are" is pronounced /ɑɹ/, but because he's singing it so fast the /ɹ/ ("r") gets dropped, which is normal in parts of the English speaking world with non-rhotic accents. American accents are mostly rhotic, which means they always pronounce their "r"s.

   /j/ ("y") is a semivowel and in some words is almost indistinguishable from /i/ ("ee"). "either" is pronounced /ˈaɪ.ðə(ɹ)/ ("eyether") or /ˈiː.ðə(ɹ)/ ("eether"). You might be hearing /ɑj/ as /aɪ/ or /iː/. With the /ə/ (no standard spelling, ~"a") at the end, you might hear "eye-a"/"a-ee-a" and think it's "either".

2. "gonna" is slang for "going to". "going to" is pronounced /ˈɡɔ.ɪŋ.tə/ because the word "to" is not emphasised. In "gonna", /ɪŋ/ ("ing") is reduced to /n/ ("n") and /tə/ ("to", ~"ta") is reduced to /ə/ (no standard spelling, ~"a") giving /ˈɡɔ.nə/.

   I can't explain why you seemingly don't hear this word, since hearing "either" for "are you" seems completely explained as above.

Since your profile says you're in Galicia, Spain, I will assume you speak Galician. According to Wikipedia, Galician phonology has no consonant /j/, although /j/ is found in diphthongs (a two vowel sound starting on one vowel and ending on the other) such as /aj/ ("caixa"). Galician also has /θ/ ("macio", "cruz"). Since /j/ is always the last sound of a Galician diphthong, you are used to hearing a consonant after it.

In English, /j/ is usually a consonant so is almost always followed by a vowel. Since you want to hear a consonant, I think you hear a /θ/ where none exists, although the sound in "either" is actually /ð/. The difference between [θ] and [ð] is that [θ] is unvoiced and [ð] is voiced. Wikipedia doesn't list /ð/ as a phoneme in Galician, although it does give a few sample words with /ð/ in them ("corda", "couberdes", etc.). It's possible that in Galician [ð] is an allophone of [d].

What is sung is /ˈɑ.jəˈɡɔ.nə ɡoʊ maɪ weɪ/, which is quite different from /ˈaɪ.ðə ɡoʊ maɪ weɪ/ and /ˈiː.ðə ɡoʊ maɪ weɪ/.

Answer 2

I am a bit of a novice when it comes to IPA transcriptions, but I would tentatively suggest aju gənə - and as a native speaker, to be honest, Lenny's pronunciation here does not seem unusual, distorted, misleading or hard to discern at all. Playing around with Wikipedia's IPA vowel chart with audio, compared to my own accent his initial vowel is more open and fronted, I think. His is more towards an a or æ whereas my own would be closer to ɑ. I can see how you could also hear it as the aɪ of either. The "r" in "are" is non existent, which is normal for me, but not in all accents, see Rhoticity in English. Those are the two main things that I can notice which may go some way to explaining why you hear "either". But ultimately, I definitely hear four syllables in aju gənə, which I cannot map to the two syllables of "either".