"Dress Down" was one of the first songs I had ever written. It came out of a year-long spree that began shortly after I started playing guitar. Songs get misplaced over time, however, and - without Jeff - "Dress Down" likely would have become a casualty of an increasingly-forgetful mind. He asked for the song, I said, 'sure,' and he gave it the shave-and-a-haircut writing revision it needed, making it 100 times more cohesive than my own crude early demo ever was. But don't worry, friends. You'll be able to compare the two when the box set comes out. I'm not kidding. -Brian

"Dress Down" was a track on the first demo Brian ever shared with me and, with the exception of "Joseph" (which would later surface on the Paper Jets' first album), my favorite cut on that disc of demos, not in the least because of the soulful flavor of the chorus and the syncopation of the longer lines in the lyric (i.e. "But pretty soon, you'll find there's no more room inside that young man's heart / No more love to give"), both of which reminded me vaguely of the Pointer Sisters' funk workout "How Long (Betcha Got a Chick on the Side)," one of my favorite R&B 45s of the '70s, but Brian was never crazy about the lyric, and it was consequently one of the few cuts from that early set of demos to never make it onto either a Paper Jets or Michelle Cacciatore record. With Brian's blessing, I went back many years later and took a stab at rewriting the lyric, keeping Brian's original chorus fully intact, as well as some of the more fun and syncopated lines like the one mentioned above. I don't know if the new lyric I came up with is actually superior, but it's fun to sing and has a very playful and lighthearted lyric (i.e. the line "And while you made your face up, would you believe I wrote this whole LP?"), and I have really fond memories of singing the new lyric for Brian and cracking him up repeatedly during the third verse. Incidentally, for all you friends of the band out there, keep your ears open in the second verse for the passing reference to our good friend Matt Pischl (of the Philadelphia-area rock outfit 58 Fury)! Brian and I are both big R&B buffs (Brian actually does a superb cover of Otis Redding's "That's How Strong My Love Is" in his rare solo sets that knocks me out everytime I hear it), so this one was really fun to record and a rare opportunity to explore my more soulful side as a vocalist. -Jeff