Since I am not a professional I would be able to get away with singing it even uploading it to Youtube but the moment I started selling it I would be in trouble.
Still false. No permissions for recording other people’s published songs are required, period. Can you imagine the amount of communication traffic back and forth that such a system would entail? One needs permissions (something that I once negotiated) when requesting rights to translate the lyrics into another language, and the reason for it is that a co-author is then introduced, who might claim some part of royalties, which is something that American songwriters rarely if ever agree to grant, even if they grant a permission to translate.
I just remembered reading in interviews with professional songwriters of cases when unpublished songs were recorded by performers other than those for whom the songs were originally intended, due to the shenanigans of the publishers, who employed these songwriters, even if the songwriters still owned the rights to their compositions.