Songfacts®:

• This song starts with a field recording of Kacey Musgraves' late grandmother before the singer sings about the joys and pitfalls of growing up in a small town. Musgraves told Entertainment Weekly: "It was complete serendipity that I got to use a recording of my late grandmother's voice that I found for the intro of that song."
• Kacey Musgraves grew up in Golden, a rural area near the Wood County town of Mineola, (population 4,515 at the 2010 census). Mineola is on US Highway 80, in East Texas. "It's all love," she maintained to Taste of Country about her small town origins. "There's a lot of truth though. There's a lot of BS that happens sometimes, and you just notice it more because there's less people than in a big city. But I love where I'm from."
• It was Musgraves' co-writer, Shane McAnally, who urged the singer to use the recording of her grandmother (aka Memaw) in the song. She explained: "Whenever we were producing 'This Town,' I kind of pictured like a radio or like a TV in the background, or like small town conversation. I was going through my voice notes, and…I brought that up. I was like, 'I have this audio of Memaw talking,' and he said, 'What if we put that in the song?' And it was brilliant, so we found a good part of the story and put it in there."