I’ve always been a big fan of music, though throughout my teens and early twenties, I could seldom afford to buy all the music I wanted to own and listen to whenever I wanted. Streaming music didn’t exist back then, so if you didn’t own a particular record, you were dependent on the whims of local radio stations. So we came up with various ways to work around that. We might record a favorite track off the radio. Or we might borrow the album from a friend and “just until I can afford it,” make a tape of it (and we fully expected when a friend borrowed an album from us, they were doing the same thing).

That’s one reason I spent a rather large part of my late 30s buying CDs of old albums from previous decades. I really did want to own a legitimate copy, send a few royalties toward the musicians whose work I had loved so much. That’s also one reason, since going digital, that I regularly scroll through online music stores looking for re-releases of albums recorded 30 or more years ago.

One consequence of those can’t-afford-music years is that I often didn’t know or remember the titles of a lot of songs I listened to. I had a bad habit of not writing down the track names when I made a copy of a tape. My favorite tracks on a particular album I would know the titles, but several of the other songs I would wind up thinking of as “that song right after X” or I might pick a phrase that was repeated that might sound like a title.

And then, of course, there are the misheard lyrics…

Misheard lyrics are often called Mondegreens. The word was proposed by Sylvia Wright in an essay for Harper’s magazine back in 1954. She talked about how, when she was younger, her mother read poetry to her, and one of her favorites was a ballad that include the lines, “They have slain the Earl O’Moray, and laid him on the green.” Except Wright had always heard the line as, “They have slain the Earl O’Mory and the Lady Mondegreen.”

She argued that to count as a Mondegreen, the mishearing of a line of poetry or lyric from a song needed to change the meaning, but also to change it for the better. For her, the misheard line conjured an image of the Earl being murdered by his enemies, but in his dying moments, holding the hand of his beloved, who was also a victim of this tragedy. Later, when she learned the poem makes no mention of a Lady, she thought it was a much less satisfying ending to the poem to have the man die alone.

I was reminded of a particularly weird one of my own mondegreens by a video a friend shared this week. Way back, during my first year in college, the Police released their third album Zenyattà Mondatta, which included two hit singles. The band had had a number of hits in the two previous years, and I knew them, but they hadn’t really grabbed me. That happened the following year, with Ghost in the Machine, which became their first album I bought. The second album I bought was their fifth (and last), Synchronicity.

It was sometime after the release of Ghost in the Machine that I wound up with a cassette copy of the earlier Zenyattà Mondatta, which had a number of songs that had never been released as singles, but which I quite liked. There was one that I quite liked but could never quite figure out what it was about. The lyrics were a bit hard to make out in some sections, and it was easy to get lost in the drum and guitar work of the original. A few phrases stuck out, such as something about hiding his face in shame, and about about cameras at a party. And then those frequent references to a Reverend.

A few years later, after the band broke up and Sting had released few albums as a solo act, an acquaintance who was a much bigger Sting fan than I was playing one of the newer albums, and a live version of one of my favorite songs from Zenyattà Mondatta popped up. I mentioned that I liked the song, but had always had trouble figuring out what it was about. The friend explained that it was one of The Police’s early political songs, and that it was about how easy it is for people to claim to be concerned about the poor, without actually doing anything about it. A couple other people with us disagreed, and the conversation drifted into a discussion about the meanings of various works or art and so forth.

I don’t remember if we ever came to a consensus about the song, but the rich and poor thing made sense to me, because of the references in the lyrics to Reverend Tutsia. I just assumed that this Reverend Tutsia guy must have been involved in some kind of charity scandal or political event that hadn’t been big news in America, but that the band’s British fans all knew who he was. So when I heard the song after that conversation, I would imagine Reverend Tutsia as a stern-faced man who had been involved with some sort of big charity thing, and then was caught living a secret life of parties and so forth, with funs skimmed from the charity.

It was still many years later before I finally bought my own, legitimate copy of Zenyattà Mondatta. I remember when looking at the track listing not recognizing a lot of the titles. After listening to the album all the way through a few times, I decided to listen only to the songs whose titles I didn’t recognize.

Imagine my shock when I realized that my “Reverend Tutsia” song was actually called “Driven to Tears,” and the phrase that I had been mishearing as “Reverend Tutsia” for years and years, was actually the title phrase. There was no reverend of any kind in the song, and while it is about the rich and poor thing, it was more of an indictment of the divide between people living in the first world and those in developing countries.

I have tried to train my ears to hear the correct lyrics. Yes, I’ve even listened to the song several times on a loop while reading the text of the full lyrics to try to get this song whose music I’ve always liked to have the correct meaning.

But even today, whenever I listen to it, I swear, Sting is singing “Reverend Tutsia” over and over during the chorus.

Maybe I need to put a character named Reverend Tutsia in a story someday. Maybe the story can include a joke about a misheard lyric.