You can decide what's true

As a kid, taping my older brother's Police albums, I always had a soft spot for those written by drummer Stewart Copeland. They generally seemed a little less earnest than Sting compositions, and more exciting than the occasional Andy Summers offering. They were more fun, basically, and that's what you want in the last years of primary school, right? Whether it was the kooky spoken word intro to On Any Other Day, the relatable angst of Contact or the comedy of co-composition Peanuts, I was a fan of Copeland the songwriter almost as much as I was of Copeland the drummer. And boy, can he drum.

Anyway, here's Does Everyone Stare? from the band's second album, 1979's Regatta de Blanc. Copeland himself wrote about the genesis of this song in a 1982 issue of Musician magazine, thus:

"I recorded the demo for that at home. I had a little home studio at the time with wires going everywhere - I think I was running the guitar through the toaster, that sort of thing - and I was playing the piano part while I sang the song, or at least what was supposed to be the lyrics of the song. And just as I finished singing, all the wires in the room acted like a radio and picked up a signal of this opera. It was perfectly in time and perfectly in tune, even the mood and sentiment of the thing were absolutely perfect. So it went straight on tape, exactly in the place that it should have gone. It had to be a message from above that this was the way the song had to go. So we actually used that, my home demo, at the beginning of the studio recording."

Which is nice if true.

Talking of truth, this song gives us a great example of that situation where, if enough people repeat a falsehood, it becomes the accepted, illusory truth or consensus reality. There must be a word for that^☥, but anyway, if you Google the lyrics of this song, every result you find, without exception as far as I can see, includes the lines:

My shots will always misfire

...and...

I'm gonna write you a sonnet but I don't know where to start

But they're not correct, are they? Or have I really been mishearing (and mis-singing) them for 47 years?

Here's the song, and the lyrics as I hear them. You can decide what's true.

I change my clothes ten times before I take you on a date
I'm in a cold sweat, panic makes me late
I know you never asked for this
I know
My shots were always mis-timed
My shots will always miss

Does everyone stare this way at you?
I only look this way at you

I change my clothes ten times before I take you on a date
I get the heebie-jeebies, and my panic makes me late
I break into a cold sweat reaching for the phone
I let it ring twice before I chicken out and decide you're not at home

Does everyone stare the way I do?
I only stare this way at you

I never noticed the size of my feet
Until I kicked you in the shins
Will you ever forgive me
For the shape I'm in
For the shape I'm in

Does everyone stare the way I do?
I only stare this way at you

I wanna write you a sonnet but I don't know where to start
I'm so used to laughing at the things in my heart
Last of all I'm sorry 'cos you never asked for this
I can see I'm not your type and my shot will always miss
Always miss

Does everyone stare the way I do?
I only stare this way at you (repeat to fade)

P.S. In an earlier draft of this post, a typo led me to calling the album Regatta de Bland. Settle down at the back...

^☥ Baudrillardian, perhaps? "In a world of appearance, image, and illusion, Baudrillard suggests, reality disappears although its traces continue to nourish an illusion of the real." Although what Baudrillard would have made of the Internet in general, and lyric websites in particular, is not well documented, as far as I know...