Songfacts®:

• Loaded with metaphors, this song is about life, plain and simple. Gretchen Peters wrote it about a time when the city of Nashville, Tennessee, was experiencing a "funny growing pains kind of stage." Not unlike a person. "It's got a thread of sadness that goes through it a little bit," says Peters. "But it's upbeat. It really actually came about because I had moved to downtown Nashville and I started thinking about the downtown. And there weren't a lot of groups back downtown, so there was this kind of emptiness there still. And I had moved downtown and I was feeling so great about it. But the town, it was a little bit sad and it's a little bit happy. I thought it would make a great metaphor for a person, the verse about 'there's a hole in the middle where nobody goes.' It was a happy song. But it acknowledges, I think, some sadness." (Check out our interview with Gretchen Peters. Her website is gretchenpeters.com.)