“First Time Caller” by White Lies, Sunday, October 30, 2022
Big TV is White Lie's first concept record. Every song on the record is part of a story in which a woman in the U.K. decides that her current relationship is not fulfilling, so she decides to wander around Europe in order to find herself. The fourth track, after the instrumental "Space i,” helps to begin this journey. Whereas "Big TV" was the story's status quo, "There Goes Our Love Again" was the rising action in which the female protagonist wanders away from stability into something more adventurous, leaving her stable partner, and finding a life of her own.
WE GO LIVE IN A HEARTBEAT. I remember radio call in shows. If you were the 20th caller or something like that, if you could answer the trivia question, you could win tickets to a concert, go on an all-expense-paid trip to Disney world, or $1000. The pop radio station out of Charlotte was giving away money as they always did, but suddenly my mom tuned in and started trying to call. It was like bizarro world. One of the church members was a frequent listener to the KISS radio station and I guess she had told my mom about the contest. So she enlisted us to listen and call in. While waiting for the call-in opportunities, my mom complained about the worldly music—the hip-hop, the muddled lyrics, the sexual lyrics if she happened to catch the lyrics. Of course we didn’t win. We didn’t even get ahold of the station, just a busy signal. It turns out that people buy special phone dialing computers to jump in front of all the rest of us who have to physically press buttons. So I’ve never won a radio contest and never dedicated a love song to someone while listening to Delilah, but my sister did get her voice message on TVU’s Ten Most Wanted.
I WANT YOU TO LOVE ME MORE THAN I LOVE YOU. How much the music world has changed since I grew up stuck in the car with the staticky light rock radio stations playing either John Tesh or Delilah. In between ‘80s soft rock, Tesh read knowledge now easily found in a Buzzfeed article or Delilah would feature callers confessing their love with a cheesy song. When I first heard these radio shows, I thought Delilah was a local DJ. She even announced at the top of the hour, “You’re listening to Light 10x.x Greenville, Spartanburg, Anderson.” But when we traveled to another part of the country, Delilah was also dreamily reading her script. I imagine her either enjoying a bottle of wine or a joint, which keeps her chiller than chill. The station fades out and we plead with mom to change the station. She acquiesces only to find another station playing the same songs with a different DJ.
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