Quarter in a payphone
Drying laundry on the line
Watching sun tea in the window
Pocket watch tellin’ time
Seems like only yesterday, I’d get a blank cassette
Record the country countdown ’cause I couldn’t buy it yet
That’s from Automatic, a catchy, insightful and sad song by Miranda Lambert. I’ve added the full lyrics at the end of this post.
Having things come too easily can be a curse, as many a billionaire’s offspring can tell you (anyone watched Succession? ‘Nuff said). And having too much of something is often not great either: ever taken ages to pick something from Netflix’s catalogue of hundreds of TV shows and just given up? How does that work?!
And music… Do I have any readers old enough to remember the cheap cassettes you’d buy from the market, so thin that you could hear what was on the other side playing at the same time?
I don’t know what the cheaper cassette tapes were made of but it kinda felt like if you so much as stared at it for too long it might burst into flames. They were always a dismal purchase; you knew there was nothing but a tragic audio experience ahead (and the hinges on the boxes had a life expectancy of twenty minutes).
Occasionally I would acquire a TDX or Memorex tape and save it for something special (I used to record the audio of movies on my tape recorder, years before we could afford a video player! The Christmas Day that I received that fantastic present, I made everyone sit in silence while we watched / I recorded Chitty Chitty Bang Bang).
The pioneer of this rudimentary home entertainment innovation was my friend Nicola, who once ushered me into her room and played an episode of Cheers she’d recorded on her machine. In the 80s you got your kicks where you could.
Nicola’s family also owned a VCR way before we did. This meant that she could, if she wanted and was allowed, get up in the middle of the night and come down to watch a movie. Movies were everything to me and I couldn’t get my head around the impossible freedom and luxury of this invention. It was like having your own Hollywood studio in your home.
And in that glorious era when we did get our own VCR, I treated it with great respect, even down to not writing on the video cassette labels. No sirree, I assigned each tape a number and then recorded their contents in a little book, which was much neater. Many movies would sit there, unwatched (The Bedroom Window and Spartacus, I’m looking at you) for years until they would finally be recorded over, passed over like ageing starlets who never hit the big time. RIP.
Sometimes having infinite choice is a good thing: after all, in the old days we’d spend two week’s pocket money on an LP only to discover it had one good song on it. Thank you, Spotify, for solving this, although is the consequence that we skim and skip too much? If you went to the trouble of renting a video from the shop, you were loath to give up on it too soon, believe me.
What’s my point? That in art and life, a little is often enough. It’s good for the soul and imagination.
Thanks for reading.
Until next week,
J x
Automatic
Quarter in a payphone
Drying laundry on the line
Watching sun tea in the window
Pocket watch tellin’ time
Seems like only yesterday, I’d get a blank cassette
Record the country countdown ’cause I couldn’t buy it yet
If we drove all the way to Dallas just to buy an Easter dress
We’d take along a Rand McNally, stand in line to pay for gas
God knows that shifting gears ain’t what it used to be
I learned to drive that ’55, just like a queen, three on a tree
Hey, what ever happened to waiting your turn
Doing it all by hand?
‘Cause when everything is handed to you
It’s only worth as much as the time put in
It all just seems so good the way we had it
Back before everything became automatic
If you had something to say
You’d write it on a piece of paper
Then you put a stamp on it
And they’d get it three days later
Boys would call the girls
And girls would turn them down
Staying married was the only way to work your problems out
Hey, what ever happened to waiting your turn
Doing it all by hand?
‘Cause when everything is handed to you
It’s only worth as much as the time put in
It all just seems so good the way we had it
Back before everything became automatic, yeah
Automatic
Let’s roll the windows down
Windows with the cranks
Come on, let’s take a picture
The kind you gotta shake
Hey, what ever happened to waiting your turn
Doing it all by hand?
‘Cause when everything is handed to you
It’s only worth as much as the time put in
It all just seems so good the way we had it
Back before everything became automatic, yeah
Automatic
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Miranda Lambert / Natalie Hemby / Nicolle Galyon
Automatic lyrics © BMG Rights Management, Reservoir Media Management Inc, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner Chappell Music, Inc
Jessica Harper Uncanceled 
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