Christian & Marco - aka songwriting team "DraLo": One night, at the end of rehearsal while everyone was breaking down, Nick started playing this haunting guitar picking riff that had a feel similar to "Turn the Page" by Bob Seger. I remember being drawn in by the vibe of the riff. Then Caleb sang the first line "When the lights go down in Detroit" and just hummed through some melodies. I mentioned that I thought it had tremendous potential and we should write a "Detroit'" themed song around that line. We'd been waiting for the right song idea to experiment with and explore adding Hip Hop elements to it, and we ended up putting a loop underneath the main guitar riff that ties the groove together.

When writing the lyrics we wanted to paint a picture of the reality of the despair felt by many and then bring it all together with a message of hope and love for the city that so many people feel. The first part of the song is about the desperation that people have felt through the years. The pre-chorus and chorus are basically saying that "we are the answer". Lets stop waiting for some outside force to come in and fix things. Let's take things into our own hands and take action on our own to rebuild Detroit. The song is meant to inspire people come together and make this city great once again.

Jefferson Ave. is a main thoroughfare that runs parallel with the Detroit River for the entire length of the city, and we wanted to use a point of reference that everyone knew and everyone could understand. If you are from here, when you think of Jefferson Ave., you think of Detroit. The choir was the last part of the writing process. Detroit has a great Gospel heritage and we wanted the song to have that "everyone come together and sing" feel to it, and the choir gives that sense of community to the song. Some songs are difficult and laborious to translate from an idea to an actual album track, but Down Jefferson was captured perfectly the way we envisioned it and we couldn't be happier with the end result.

Nick - guitar: When I originally wrote the riff I had it in mind for a hip hop song, something melodic that would work over a heavy beat. The song formed in to something both desperate and hopeful sounding, fitting for a song about Detroit and Marco was inspired the same way when he heard the riff for the 1st time!

Caleb - singer: It's pretty straight forward and literal. Detroit is unfortunately known around the world as a city with high crime and a place to be scared of. The opening line is explaining and setting up a scenario for the listener to be put in to understand Detroit. 'Down Jefferson' is a song of hope and truth. It specifically talks about Detroit but the bigger message can be understood by everyone, which is about humanity coming together to make something and in this case some place better for our future generations.