ballpoint pens archive

archive collection 1 – mazes › 02 drag through a friday

lyrics

jennifer was a beautiful girl
she sparkled here to california
and everyone she left in her wake
was jealous of her; they wanted to fuck her

she was determined to make it, oh yeah
live in sin when you can’t make the ends meet
”they’ll chew you up and spit you right out,”
her mother said as she let her daughter go

so gimme those angel arms
and hold me tightly
I can’t get enough of you
I wanna love you nightly

gimme, gimme a sleeping pill
a warm pie cools on the windowsill
find out what you’re searching for
’cause I don’t wanna answer for it anymore

gimme, gimme so many tips
I don’t wanna fuck it up, I wanna answer it
anyone, in any way
can drag themselves through on a friday

so gimme those angel arms
and hold me tightly
I can’t get enough of you
I wanna love you nightly

oh, you are my only escape
all that you’re putting me through
oh, how I love to wait
for you

so gimme those angel arms
and hold me tightly
I can’t get enough of you
I wanna love you nightly

notes

I’ve always loved this song’s chorus — a joyful, pleading, catchy hook with a rhyme (hold me tightly / love me nightly) just goofy enough to embed itself in your brain.

But in the verses, his singing was inaudible, buried under squeaky distortion. I used AI “de-mixing” to separate his voice from the instrumental. There are a handful of services that offer this technology now, and each produces a slightly different result. After cobbling together the output of four of them, I could finally hear all the lyrics.

I recorded myself singing backup, doing my best to match his cadence and delivery, helping to fill spaces where his voice dropped out at certain frequencies. Afterwards, the song was easier to make out, but the cleanly-recorded elements I had added sat strangely with his original track. So I degraded them, adding layer after layer of distortion until the song sounded more like the dirty, tossed-off thing it started out as.