Prieš grodamas “The Dress Looks Nice On You”, Sufjan Stevens kartais papasakoja kažką panašaus į:
“So when we moved up north we lived here in Pickerall Lake. We took I-75, me and my 2 brothers and my 3 sisters, and we also took a Pommeranian dog, my brother had a california king snake, and we had a dog called a bouvier, bouveitus flanders, which, is a, as you probably know a french sheep-herding dog. They’re very beautiful, it was my mother’s favorite dog. So we all went in the station wagon we moved up here, into my grandmother’s home. It was a summer home, so it was kind of cold in the winter, ’cause the winters up north are very terrible. Anyway, that’s where I went to middle school and high school, up there, out of the city, in the country. And there wasn’t a lot going on. It felt like going back in time, from moving out of Detroit up there. So there wasn’t a lot to do until I hit puberty. And then I met my friend Robin, and she was 18 years old and we went to the same high school. She was a senior and I was a freshman, my first year there. She was really nice, and she had these really big glasses which were popular then, tortoise-shell types. And she had curly hair, which was popular then as well. And anyway, she had a car, which was really kind of cool. Uh, so I was climbing the social ladder, ’cause I had a girlfriend with a car. And I didn’t even have a summer job or my driver’s license. So we would go driving around sometimes and we’d go to the lakes and the rivers, sometimes we’d go fishing, sometimes we’d go waterskiing. But what she liked to do the best was to go shopping. And there wasn’t much shopping up here. ‘Cause there’s just, uh, K-mart from the last song. There’s a lot of K-mart and strip malls and things like that. So we would go down to this, which was the nearest kind of big city, called Travis City, and she had collected these porcelain plates, they were collector’s plates, and they had famous people on them, she had one with Mickey Mouse and she had one with Muhammed Ali. She had one with Princess Diana, and things like that. So she would go down to the mall, ’cause there was a store that just had those, she would get those. And she also bought clothing. She bought a lot of dresses, so she tried on this one, and she came out of the dressing room and she says, “Well what do you think of this?” I was only 14, and I wasn’t very mature or gracious yet. I didn’t know how to open doors for women or buy flowers and things like that. So I said, “Well, it looks kind of complicated.” Because this was a time when fashion was really going downhill, and people were mixing kind of paisley and floral and tweed and denim and things like that so it was just all over the place, ’cause I think at that time Madonna was kind of like the fashion role model for most women. So anyway, uh, she said, “No you’re supposed to say, ‘The dress looks nice on you.'” So, that’s what she told me. She taught me a lot of things about that, about how to talk to a woman and what to say and what not to say. So years later I figured this out, and that’s when I wrote this song about that.”
Kai kuriems gražiems dalykams reikia užaugti. Tiek išmokti pasakyti, tiek išmokti priimti, tiek nusipelnyti gauti.