Acrylic

Lyrics

[Intro]
(fingernails on something hard, in perfect time, and then a piano joins them)

[Verse 1]
On the set of a film in 1979, waiting between takes, first film she ever made,
no instrument in her hands, no piano in the trailer, nothing to write with,
she starts drumming her nails on the back of her acrylic nails
and the rhythm is good — the rhythm is really good — so she keeps it.

[Chorus]
Click, click. That's the song. That is literally the percussion on the record.
She played her own fingernails on the master. They are in the mix. Go and listen.
The biggest working-woman anthem anybody ever wrote
was built on the sound of a manicure, on a lunch break, by accident.

[Verse 2]
And Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda were sat right there and watched her do it,
and neither of them thought anything of it, because she did that constantly,
because she wrote constantly, on receipts, on napkins, on the back of a script,
because a songwriter is not a person who has ideas — it is a person who writes them down.

[Chorus]
Click, click. Number one country. Number one pop. Oscar nomination.
And it became a real thing, outside the film — it got sung at actual pickets,
by actual women in actual offices who had never heard of Locust Ridge,
and it is still sung, and she never once minded that it left her.

[Bridge]
She said the reason she could write about working women
was that she had never for one second stopped being one,
and the difference between her and everybody who came after
is that she never learned to pretend it was easy.

[Outro]
(the nails, alone, still perfectly in time)
Click, click.
On a lunch break.