Caress Me Down

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.