Miranda Lambert's "Automatic" is a Sweet Walk Down Memory Lane

“Seems like only yesterday I'd get a blank cassette, record the country countdown 'cause I couldn't buy it yet.” -Miranda Lambert

I’ve listened to Miranda Lambert’s new song “Automatic” at least a hundred times, but it wasn’t until this morning that I heard the line above and stopped what I was doing to really pay attention to the rest of the song.

I’m four years older than Miranda, which isn’t much of a gap as adults, but as children, it would have felt like I was ages older than she. Yet somehow, Miranda has perfectly summed up my childhood in “Automatic.” I still remember my black and tan tape recorder with the duct tape that held the batteries in because I somehow lost the back and I remember the stacks of cassette tapes stashed around my bedroom and scrambling to find a blank one to record the nightly countdown off the radio because I didn’t have the money to buy the full records or cassette tapes.

“Come on let's take a picture. The kind you gotta shake.” I remember how proud my grandma was that she had a Polaroid camera and how after taking a picture, she’d let us kids take turn shaking it until the image appeared. I still have a couple of those in boxes someplace.

“Quarter in a payphone. Drying laundry on the line.” Payphones are so rare these days that whenever I spot one, I pull over to take a picture so that someday I’ll be able to show my kids when I explain about “that one time when I had to use a payphone to call Grandma from the side of the road....” And what ever happened to drying laundry on the line? I remember my mom sending me out with a basket of wet clothes twice my size and weight with old wooden clothes pins that never liked to hold on the line. I remember standing on my tip toes to reach and concentrating extra hard while pinning the clothes up so that there wouldn’t be any stiff pin marks in the shoulders making it look like I had built in shoulder pads.

If you were born in the 80’s and haven’t REALLY listened to Miranda’s “Automatic,” you should. I promise you it’ll bring back floods of memories from simpler days gone by. And if you’re interested in picking up the song, it’s on sale right now on iTunes, or you can wait until her album, “Platinum” comes out in June.