James Taylor / Cars (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) / 2006
Our Town
wistful, resigned, tender
A meditation on a small town's decline, written as a soft eulogy sung in the voice of someone who watched the place rise and now watches it hollow out. Taylor uses the film's context (a story about the interstate bypassing old Route 66 towns) to universalize a specific American loss -- economic obsolescence dressed as quiet heartbreak.
decline of small-town America obsolescence and progress loyalty to place aging and time economic abandonment
Who's speaking
A first-person communal voice -- someone who helped build the town and now narrates its fading, addressing 'you' in a way that folds the listener into the same experience of loss. The voice is sincere rather than embittered, more elegy than protest.
What happens
The song moves from founding (building and watching a town grow) through the slow, almost imperceptible arrival of change, to the present tense of a town whose commercial life has emptied out. It ends not with resolution but with a stated choice to stay and love the place despite everything.
How it's built
Simple verse-chorus form built on plain, folk-hymn language. The chorus repeats and slightly escalates each time -- the second pass adds the blunt correction that the lights don't shine 'at all,' the third pass adds the resigned but defiant final commitment. This incremental sharpening substitutes for a bridge or key change; the song's drama is carried by small lyrical edits rather than musical surprise.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song opens in a distant but not mythic past, establishing pride of ownership and labor -- the town as something built by hand and watched over, which sets up everything that follows as a loss of stewardship rather than just a place changing.
Second verse
“you never see it coming”
This verse shifts from pride to helplessness. Change is described as gradual and invisible until it's total, which frames the town's decline as something suffered rather than caused -- nobody to blame, which deepens the melancholy.
First chorus
The image of a main street that no longer functions as one turns a physical description into a statement about identity -- the street's decline stands in for the town's loss of purpose.
Third verse
The daily ritual of opening a business that draws no customers captures obsolescence as routine rather than crisis -- people keep performing an economic role the world has stopped needing, which is quietly devastating.
Final chorus
“love it anyway, come what may”
The closing lines refuse both nostalgia and despair. Rather than resolving the town's fate, the song settles on loyalty as the only available response, turning the elegy into a quiet act of allegiance.
Craft
- refrain with variation
- The recurring 'main street' line is repeated but altered each time, tightening the emotional screw -- from faded light to no light to no reason to stay -- so the chorus itself performs the town's decline.
- personification
- The town is treated almost like an aging body or person who is 'grown,' 'watched,' and ultimately abandoned by others, which lets the economic story read as an intimate relationship rather than a policy failure.
- understatement
- Catastrophic change (the world caving in) is described in flat, everyday diction, matching the numbness of watching decline happen slowly rather than all at once.
Reading it
The most direct reading treats this as a soundtrack song for a film about towns bypassed by the interstate -- a lament for communities rendered irrelevant by progress they had no say in. A broader reading extends the 'town' into a metaphor for any life, relationship, or identity that quietly stops serving its original purpose while the people inside it keep performing the same rituals. Both readings coexist without contradiction; the song's plainness supports the metaphor without insisting on it.
Context
Written for Pixar's Cars, which is explicitly about towns left behind when the interstate replaced old highways like Route 66. Taylor's plainspoken, folk-adjacent style suits that theme, echoing a long American tradition of small-town elegies in country and folk music. I don't have reliable information about the specific writing or recording circumstances beyond its use as the film's closing theme.
Listen for
- the escalating edits to the recurring main street line across each chorus
- the shift from active verbs of building to passive description of decline
- the flat, unembellished delivery that keeps the song from tipping into melodrama
- the final line's quiet assertion of loyalty as the only real resolution offered
About James Taylor
James Vernon Taylor is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist.
b. 1948 / United States
Full biography and catalogue