Songfacts®:

• A topic that often shows up in the music of Smile Empty Soul is apathy. They're all about expressing their passions, with the band name a reference to fake people who smile through life but never really live it.
  
  In this song, they take aim at the "nowhere kids" with no real ambition, abetted by overprotective parents and mollifying television programming. Lead singer Sean Danielsen explained to MTV: "The song's about us and our friends back home being raised by TV sets. There's a total epidemic going on in our town (Santa Clarita, California) where nobody cares about going to college or getting a career together. All they care about is partying. You could be, like, 25 years old looking for the local high school party to go to."
• The song was written in 2002 and included on Smile Empty Soul's self-titled debut album the following year. Their first single, "Bottom Of A Bottle," gave many the impression that they were a reckless party band, thanks to lyrics like "I do it for the drugs, I do it just to feel alive." The band insisted that the drug references were a metaphor for anything that lights your fire, but they had a hard time escaping the narrative. "Nowhere Kids" was released as the second single with hopes that they would be taken more seriously. The song didn't do as well as "Bottom Of A Bottle," but it did help the album sell over 500,000 copies. Unfortunately, that was the high-water mark for the band, which soldiered on but never came close to those sales totals.
• Smile Empty Soul made a video for this song that shows what at first glance appears to be happy family. But on closer inspection, we see that the kids smiling in the family photo have some issues, including cutting.
• According to Sean Danielsen, this song was written very quickly after he hit on the guitar riff. The band worked up the track and they soon completed it with producer John Lewis Parker.
• In 2012, Shinedown released a song with the same title that has a similar theme.