"You Are The Girl" actually began five or six years ago. I had that melodic hook you hear on the intro as the starting point and the verses came pretty easily. I was never really happy with the chorus, though. The idea at the time was about shutting out everything going on outside (mostly the constant demands of music) to be with your girl for a night. But the focus lyrically was on the stuff that tries to get in the door. I let it sit for a year or two until I was writing with a friend of mine one weekend and I pulled it out. He immediately realized the focus on the chorus needed to be shifted to "the girl" and musically it really needed to open up. We wrote the chorus as it exists today in about 5 minutes. The song still needed a bridge and we had several ideas but all of them were flawed in one way or another. So the song went back in the notebook for another couple years.

After PFB released our EP "Motor City Blood", I was digging through my songwriting notebook and came back across this song. It was right in the wheelhouse of what we had been working on as a band and I think that context helped me put all the pieces together. I could really hear all the parts, even down to drum accents, which is a rare thing for me. I brought it into the practice room shortly thereafter and it came together flawlessly.

We played it live for about 6 months and after listening to some pre-production tracks we had laid down, I heard the final piece of the puzzle - changing that opening lick to a banjo instead of a guitar and then incorporating that texture throughout the song. And when it came time to lay it down, Brad Wright knocked the ball out of the park!