off-key

"Socialism is good…" a pensioner warbles into a portable karaoke mic, slightly off-key and drowned out by her friends' chatter.

Amid all of this, responses from the administration were sometimes glaringly off-key.

These songs look and feel like old-Hollywood-style musical numbers, but charm because of their imperfections; characters sing off-key, they lose their breath and their voices crack.

That moment when Jake sings an off-key version of “...Baby One More Time” is “burned into my frontal cortex,” he says.

And as for all those off-key notes, “Neither Arthur nor Lee are professional singers, and they shouldn’t sound like they are,” Gaga told Vogue.