Our Town

She wrote it in 1986, aged twenty-five. She told Fresh Air that she had passed through a typical dead Midwestern town of boarded-up windows, and for the first time felt a song coming on of its own accord. She borrowed her brother's guitar, and a day or two later at home it arrived exactly as it is now, one of the rare songs she never had to change. She took it as the sign of her calling. To the Boston Globe she said she wrote it in Topeka about a Kansas town, though she had no hometown like that herself.

Jayson Greene of Pitchfork hears a woman watching her town dwindle, remembering where she had her babies and where her parents are buried, before leaving at the end against her will, and praised its "unsentimental bleakness". Robert Christgau found it contrived beside Let the Mystery Be. It is track five on Infamous Angel, cut live in the 1992 sessions with Jim Rooney producing. It had a music video in 1992, and Warner issued it as a single in Britain in 1993. It closed the final episode of Northern Exposure on 26 July 1995.

Live

setlist.fm logs it 77 times, second only to Let the Mystery Be in her sets, starting at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley on 9 July 1992, a show broadcast on KPFA and released in 2017. She sang it on A Prairie Home Companion that November and on the first series of the Transatlantic Sessions, and live versions appear on several compilations and on her 2007 recording from The Ark in Ann Arbor. In October 2026 she closed her Red Rocks set with it alongside Adrianne Lenker.

setlist.fm logs more covers of it than of any other DeMent song. Jody Stecher and Kate Brislin made it the title track of a 1993 album, Kate Rusby recorded it on Sleepless (1999), and Trampled by Turtles, who have played it more than anyone else, released it on their 2019 Sigourney Fever EP. Both uploads in the hypersongs web are the same studio recording: one is the official album audio from the 2017 Yep Roc reissue, the other a fan's edit of the 1992 music video with the album audio laid over it.