The song lyrics were written by the band Van Halen, as they were asked to write a song for the 1979 movie "Over the Edge" starring Matt Dillon. The movie (and the lyrics, although more obliquely) are about bored, rebellious youth with nothing better to do than get into trouble. If you see the movie, these lyrics will make more sense. It's a great movie if you grew up in the 70s/80s you'll definitely remember some of these characters from your own life. Fun fact, after writing the song, Van Halen decided not to let the movie use it.
Falling from the top floor your lungs
Fill like parachutes
Windows go rushing by.
People inside,
Dressed for the funeral in black and white.
These ties strangle our necks, hanging in the closet,
Found in the cubicle;
Without a name, just numbers, on the resume stored in the mainframe, marked for delete.
Please take these hands
Throw them in the river,
Wash away the things they never held
Please take these hands,
Throw me in the river,
Don't let me drown before the workday ends.
9 to 5! 9 to 5!
And we're up to our necks,
Drowning in the seconds,
Ingesting the morning commute
Lost in a dead subway sleep
Now we lie wide awake in our parents beds,
Tossing and turning.
Tomorrow we'll get up
Drive to work,
Single file
With everyday
It's like the last.
Waiting for the life to start, is it always just always ahead of the curve?
Please take these hands
Throw them in the river,
Wash away the things they never held
Please take these hands,
Throw me in the river,
Don't let me drown before the workday ends.
Just keep making copies
Of copies
Of copies
When will it end?
It'll never end,
'til it gets so bad
That the ink fills in our fingerprints
And the silhouette of your own face becomes the black cloud of war
And even in our dreams we're so afraid the weight will offset who we are
All those breaths that you took have now been canceled in your lungs.
Last night my teeth fell out like ivory typewriter keys
And all the monuments and skyscrapers burned down and filled the sea.
Save our ship
The anchor is part of the desk
We can't cut free,
The water is flooding the decks
The memo's sent through the currents
Computers spark like flares
I can see them.
They don't touch me,
Touch me.
Please someone,
Teach me how to swim.
Please, don't let me drown,
Please, don't let me drown.
Fill like parachutes
Windows go rushing by.
People inside,
Dressed for the funeral in black and white.
These ties strangle our necks, hanging in the closet,
Found in the cubicle;
Without a name, just numbers, on the resume stored in the mainframe, marked for delete.
Please take these hands
Throw them in the river,
Wash away the things they never held
Please take these hands,
Throw me in the river,
Don't let me drown before the workday ends.
9 to 5! 9 to 5!
And we're up to our necks,
Drowning in the seconds,
Ingesting the morning commute
Lost in a dead subway sleep
Now we lie wide awake in our parents beds,
Tossing and turning.
Tomorrow we'll get up
Drive to work,
Single file
With everyday
It's like the last.
Waiting for the life to start, is it always just always ahead of the curve?
Please take these hands
Throw them in the river,
Wash away the things they never held
Please take these hands,
Throw me in the river,
Don't let me drown before the workday ends.
Just keep making copies
Of copies
Of copies
When will it end?
It'll never end,
'til it gets so bad
That the ink fills in our fingerprints
And the silhouette of your own face becomes the black cloud of war
And even in our dreams we're so afraid the weight will offset who we are
All those breaths that you took have now been canceled in your lungs.
Last night my teeth fell out like ivory typewriter keys
And all the monuments and skyscrapers burned down and filled the sea.
Save our ship
The anchor is part of the desk
We can't cut free,
The water is flooding the decks
The memo's sent through the currents
Computers spark like flares
I can see them.
They don't touch me,
Touch me.
Please someone,
Teach me how to swim.
Please, don't let me drown,
Please, don't let me drown.
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Wow. Geoff puts into words what I could only dream of trying to express. Generally speaking, I think this song deals with all the things in the world we will never experience because of our tied down lives with work and such. I also think that Geoff is singing about how we get entangled in what our parents plan for us at birth. But hey, thats just my two cents.
this song is amazing, I really hope their new record sounds like this or somewhere between Jet Black and this. Geoff writes wicked good lyrics
Oh man! this song is amazing! I agree with you, xbloody187romancex, Geoff writes the most awesome lyrics. He just gets better and better.. I can't wait until War All The Time comes out. I have a feeling that it will sound alot like a mixture of Full Collapse and Jet Black New Year.
thursday is an incredible band.
brilliant... I can't wait for their new album
cheers, *
CRAZY job on those lyrics man, i had a lot of patches when i tried to write them out, the only thing is towards the end he says 'like IVORY typewriter keys'
anyway... these lyrics are so amazing, there is a lot of figurative writing embedded and it's just so awesome
"These ties strangle our necks, hanging in the closet" in this line he uses a sort of metaphor to say like the ties you wear to work that are hanging in your closet strangle your individuality and hang you
"that the ink fills in our fingerprints" this line is also extremely cool because your fingerprint is sort of a mark of your uniqueness, but he's saying you lose your idvidualness when your in the workforce for so long being stifled, and the 'ink fills in your fingerprints' and you are the same as everyone else
Yeah, I posted these lyrics. There were old ones up here which I used as a base and then made a lot of changes. I like the first line "Falling from the top FOR your life". Kind of like "running FOR your life". Like jumping off a building is getting away from the redundancy of the workplace.
anyone know where i can find this song.
You have to go to thursday.net to listen to it. It is available as a split single with Thrice on July 1st.
they have it streaming on islands site but you can also get it off of Kazaa