Vancouver power-pop OGs the New Pornographers recently released a new limited edition 7" through frontman A.C. Newman's Substack for Vinyl Club. B-side "Ego Death For Beginners" will remain a vinyl-only offering, but the band has put A-side "Ballad Of The Last Payphone" on streaming services today. It's on the more melancholic side of the New Pornos' oeuvre, with Newman and his array of vocalists (this time including Neko Case) reflecting on the last of a dying technological breed: "Nothing major, man/ It's just the last payphone."
Speaking of Newman's Substack, he wrote extensively about this track there:
Many years ago I read the story ‘Fat’ by Raymond Carver. A friend suggested it to me and it was short. So I did. I straight up read it. A little story that stuck with me. The different levels of narrative in such a little story. Told in the first person, by a waitress talking to her friend Rita. She tells Rita about a customer at the restaurant, a fat man. Nothing particularly exciting happens, Rita is waiting for the punchline, so to speak. The fat man leaves and then she tells Rita about going home to her boyfriend Rudy. Later when they are having sex, the waitress imagines she is as fat as the man at the restaurant. Her friend Rita listens, still confused, and that’s basically the story. Not the greatest book report but that is the gist of it. I liked that the reader seems to be sitting right next to Rita. You want to give her the side-eye as you read, a look that says “What’s going on with her?”
I do not claim to be the heir of Carver’s vision. I didn’t want to ape his style. It was just a story that stuck with me. When I was writing “Ballad Of The Last Payphone”, the story popped back into my head. I had been reading an article about the last payphone in NYC.
https://www.nyc.gov/content/oti/pages/press-releases/end-of-era-last-nyc-payphones-removed
I asked myself what fascinated me about the story of the last payphone. Like Rita and I wondering what is up with the waitress. It was almost like a song, as Ronnie Milsap once sang, but NOT too sad to write. I knew what the song was about! Eureka! I still had to write it but the target was in my line of sight. I wasn’t ’spraying and praying’; an expression taught to me by my tween son, to describe a noob in online combat running around shooting blindly. I think I laughed out loud when I first heard him say it.
The first verse tells a very abridged but very true story of the last payphone in NYC, and yes, it is in the Museum Of The City Of New York. They removed it in May of 2022 with a small amount of fanfare but not nearly enough! You couldn’t make the movie ‘After Hours’ anymore, that world is gone. We’re too connected, to the point of being disconnected. Your chance of missing a subway and ending up in Teri Garr’s apartment listening to the Monkees? Almost zero.
A key line in the song is “first comes love, then comes pity, then it’s terminal velocity”. It originated from another source: the song ‘Par Amour, Par Pitie’ by Sylvie Vartan. It’s always in the back of my mind to translate a song into English. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The English version of ‘Il Ragazzo Della Via Gluck’ was called ‘Concrete And Clay’ and it did NOT work. ‘La Maison Ou J’ai Grandi’ was Francoise Hardy’s French translation of the song and she hit it out of the park. In fact, I just wrote Neko about doing an English translation of Hardy’s ‘J’ai Coupe La Telephone’. She did not write me back.
So I wanted to do a translation of the Vartan song and got to work. Halfway through it I asked myself why I was doing this when I had 30 of my own songs to finish. There are some great lines in there though. Check it out, courtesy of an internet translation app:
Old worn-out jeans aren't thrown away
A damaged book is repaired
A failed photo is looked at
And a dried flower is lamented over
For love or mercy's sake
Oh oh oh for love or mercy's sake
It goes on like that. I chose to translate it to ‘for love or pity’, it felt more concise. I decided I would put it in my own song. I don’t know why I used the structure of a teasing childhood rhyme, it just came out. First comes love, then comes pity, then it’s terminal velocity. I liked how the pregnant pause after the word ‘terminal’ worked. The line could end there and nothing would be missing but then boom! Velocity. Terminal velocity.
This new batch of songs felt different to me and it is mostly because of my lyrical and vocal approach. I was trying to tell a story here. If a melody didn’t work in the delivery I changed it. This song felt very conversational so I wanted my vocals to feel that way. I wanted to boil the songs down to the key elements. In this case, the key elements were the bass line, the pedal steel and the vocals. Everything else there to prop them up. At the heart of it, I wanted the minimalism to illustrate my confidence in the song. Of course, it’s only minimal by the New Ps maximal standard, I know that. I was learning things I should already know.
OK, time to go live with this. The song is on all the streamers. I hope you like it.
Listen below.
