Songfacts®:

• The Canadian singer-songwriter was inspired to write this dreary tune when he was in the southern United States and noticed a great deal of people complaining about the lack of manufacturing jobs there. Families rely on those high-paying jobs because they allow them to survive off of a single income, so it's worrisome for those places that they are vanishing. "The idea of 'They Don't Make Anything In That Town' came from that and then I just tried to juxtapose that with scenes of when there were some little pieces of life in there," Donovan Woods explained in our interview. "It's three little tiny vignettes and little pieces of what it was like when people did still live there."
  
  We asked him why he thinks people have strong emotional reactions when he performs this song live. "I don't know. I'm interested because I thought that that song was so specific that it would be tough for people to appreciate it," he replied. "I guess it's indicative of the small towns that a lot of people are from. There's a lot of stuff dragging those towns that isn't really vocalized or addressed, so I think that's maybe why."
• Woods revealed to Absolute Punk that the detailed storytelling in the song came from actual events happening in his birthplace of Sarnia, Ontario. "Those are stories from my hometown. I don't have that negative feeling of my hometown. I go there pretty frequently," he said. "But I feel like it could be pretty hard for some people. But that's sort of just a pastiche of things that I heard about happening in the town, but things that didn't happen to me. But just sort of trying to add up to something that's indicative of a bigger story. That's all I'm trying to do."