By Will McGuirk

“This song was inspired by a Raymond Carver story called “Fat” and tells the story of a person visiting the last payphone in NYC where it currently sits, in the Museum of the City of New York. The narrator doesn't know why they are so fascinated by it, but to us it should be obvious. Obvious to me, at least.” - A.C. Newman, New Pornographers

Ah the payphone, hopeful bastion of the lost teenager and drug dealers. Such safety under the streetlight, the smell of diesel. Tech as a lost love is an odd enough sensibility for fab collective the New Pornographers to write the ‘Ballad of the Last Payphone’. The final resting place of the final payphone in New York City is in a museum. One can seek it out and muse and pine and maybe also write a fine eulogy for a time so fleeting and yet so concrete, those days when one could smash the receiver into its cradle, the vibrations running up your arm, or let the receiver hang swinging, the voice on the other end bleating out into the infinity of space. Ah the humble payphone is unmoored now. Retired to our pockets, it is we who are moored now. But one can stand in front of the last payphone in New York City and pine for the days when we were too were unmoored, gleefully lost in the last few minutes before we drew a quarter from our pocket. Hello.