Caress Me Down

Album: Sublime (1996)
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Songfacts®:

  • In this song, Sublime lead singer Brad Nowell assumes the character of a guy with Latin roots who lived in "el otro lado": the other side of the border as seen from Mexico. We hear about his relationship with girls, especially a special girl called Mixie and her family who wanted to kill him. We learn that he traveled to Costa Rica, maybe running from the relatives of Mixie, and hung out with his Latin friends drinking and surfing.

    When Songfacts asked the group's bass player Eric Wilson for insights on the song, he replied, "'Caress Me Down,' when Brad was around, he was pretty popular with the ladies, and he could have been writing about all of them all together, for all I know!"
  • Brad Nowell, who wrote the lyric, died of a drug overdose in May 1996, just two months before the Sublime album was released, which happened to be the band's breakthrough, selling over five million copies.
  • The lyric is in Spanglish with a pretty even mix of English and Spanish. Brad Nowell was fluent in Spanish and often mixed Spanish words into his lyrics. The band is from Southern California, where there was a large Mexican-American community.
  • We can infer in the chorus that the guy in this song is getting some manual stimulation (a hand job) from Mixie, who is "caressing him down."
  • Nowell introduces himself by name in the first line:

    Mucho gusto me llamo Bradley ("Nice to meet you, my name is Bradley")

    It's not the only Sublime song where he namedrops himself: in "Doin' Time" he sings:

    Summertime and the livin's easy
    Bradley's on the microphone with Ras M.G.
  • The line, "I'm hornier than Ron Jeremy" is a reference to the adult film star Ron Jeremy, who appeared in Sublime's video for "Date Rape."

Comments: 2

  • Tray from UsaI have read a badly translated version of the lyrics, I tried to learn Spanish and failed, some of the translation I read had some messed up phrases, such as " a pretty lil daughter I call Mixie". I'd love to have a good translation with actual dialects (how English words and Spanish words are actually used very differently) At one time I had 3 mtx 10s, a 400 watt Jensen amp, ceramic highs with a three way external crossover and Pioneer deck..."caress me down" jarred your bones loose when I played it
  • Ayelen from C.a.b.a., Argentinasome of the parts in spanish are quite funny cause Im latin and the way brad speaks is hilarious
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