**A Song for the Quiet Roads: Remembering “Big City Lights” by Marty Brown (1989)**
If you ask me when country music last truly echoed through the bricks of Helmond, I could point you to several memories scattered through time—some faded like yesterday’s smoke, some sharp and glowing like a fire in a winter field. But one memory seems to hover above the rest, carried always on the gentlest of breezes: a song called “Big City Lights” by Marty Brown, released in 1989.
I know what you’re thinking. “Marty Brown—didn’t he have a moment with ‘High & Dry’ and then disappeared from the charts?” And true, to the big country world, Brown is mostly a half-remembered tune from the car radio’s scan button, maybe a name lost in the haystacks. But to me, and a handful of us who listened closer—who needed songs like bread and water—“Big City Lights” was a little miracle. It was hope, heartbreak, and all the yearning in between, wrapped in the voice of a Kentucky farmboy with mud on his boots and stars in his eyes.
I still recall the first time I heard the gentle tumble of its opening guitar, spinning vinyl in the backroom of Café De Lantaarn on a rainy Helmond Thursday. The place was nearly empty; the owner, Jan, let me play DJ for the hour while he polished glasses. I found Marty Brown’s debut album, “High & Dry,” in the ‘New Arrivals’ bin—on impulse, I slipped the record from its sleeve, curious as to what this American had to say.
What unfolded was a song of longing so honest, so unvarnished, that I could hear my own story slicing through every syllable.
“It’s a long long drive
From this old county line
But these big city lights
Ain’t what they’re cracked up to be…”
The first verse landed like a stone in my chest. Back then, I was just a young country bard myself, turning small Dutch towns upside down with dust-bowl ballads most folks didn’t yet know how to love. I’d grown up on farmland five kilometers outside Helmond—patchwork fields, endless sky, and the slow romance of mud roads all my own. The city, with all its gaudy neon flicker, held both promise and threat.
As Marty’s voice cracked on the words—“I traded in the homefires / For bright marquee signs”—I felt it deep down, like an old ache. Brown was singing about rural Kentucky, I was sure—but he might as well have been talking about my own journey to Helmond’s edges, where the past tugged at my heels even as I tried to run from it.
That song haunted me for months. Every old gig, every empty-room strum at De Lantaarn, those “big city lights” framed my hinterland heartache. I wore out that vinyl until you could hear the crackles before the needle even landed on the groove. The magic of “Big City Lights” wasn’t just in the lyrics—it was the slow-building ache of its melody, the lonesome whine of the steel guitar tracing every syllable, the honest plaintiveness of Brown’s delivery.
“You can see the stars shine
From my mama’s front yard
No traffic on the highway
No strangers in the dark…”
To me, these lines were pure poetry. Maybe to the big market, Marty Brown was too “old-fashioned,” too plainspoken, too raw. But that’s just why his music cut so deep. You can’t fake that kind of longing, that need to capture a world just out of reach. Country music, at its best, is the poetry of the in-between. It’s written for folks who know how to miss what’s left behind.
After “Big City Lights,” I used to slide the record behind the counter at De Lantaarn, making sure it didn’t disappear when Jan’s overnight drifters came looking for something shiny and new. On slow nights, folks would wander in—a few old boys from the textile mill, sometimes a soldier on leave, a handful of dog-tired farmers. When the world felt especially heavy, I’d cue up that track, letting Marty Brown’s Kentucky drawl lift us all somewhere safer, slower, softer.
Once, a stranger heard the song and asked, “Is this George Strait?” I just smiled and shook my head, glad to have such precious cargo tucked in among the jukebox classics.
The chorus still rings through my mind whenever Helmond’s streetlights flicker through the summer fog:
“Big city lights
Ain’t nothing but a memory
Of the life I left behind
And the simple things I need…”
What makes “Big City Lights” so rare—so beautiful—is its refusal to chase after flash or cleverness. The lyrics aren’t trying to impress; they’re aching to confess. Marty Brown tells you, plain as day, that what he’s missing isn’t just a place, but a feeling. It’s the warmth of the familiar, the love of kinfolk, the trust in old routines and simpler times.
Maybe you have to have left a place you loved to really understand. Maybe that’s why most chart-toppers glossed right over Marty’s honest laments. They were too rich in real earth, in farmhouse dust and lost nights.
Over years, the world turned and country music changed its clothes; it added rhinestones and sharper edges. But “Big City Lights”—and those rare, soulful songs like it—remind us that there’s a home for honesty, even if it’s just in a few hearts and late-night taverns along the Maas.
Maybe you never heard this song. Maybe you never will. But in quiet corners of Helmond, and now in your hearts as you read this, let an old country singer urge you: Go searching. Find those rare gems. Cherish the music that tells you who you are, where you’re from, and what you long for when the city lights seem too harsh, too many, and not nearly enough.
Roll down the window. Let the voice of a Kentucky farmboy sing you home.
Yours from the backroads and the barrooms,
**Kroes den Bock**