**The Bitter Aftertaste of “Drinking My Way Back Home” — A Personal Ode to Gene Watson’s Forgotten Classic**
*by Kroes den Bock*
There’s a fine chop on the Zuid-Willemsvaart tonight, the water brushing against the banks of Helmond with all the melancholy of a pedal steel guitar. I know it’s cliché, but every time the Dutch dusk creeps across my window, turning the brick houses blue and the fields beyond to silhouettes, I think of the America I never saw, but heard—through worn vinyl, AM static, and smoky barroom jukeboxes.
I was asked recently, “Kroes, what’s a country song nobody remembers that you can’t live without?” Most folks might think of the classics—your Cashes, Haggards, and Wynettes. But sometimes, it’s the unheralded gems, the almost-whispers from Nashville, which dig deepest into a soul—like the faint scent of hay in an old barn you’d only sniff in your sleep.
For me, the answer is Gene Watson’s “Drinking My Way Back Home,” from his 1975 album *Love in the Hot Afternoon*. Even at its release, the song barely dented the charts—overshadowed by the slow-cooked juggernauts of that era. Yet for those who walked lonely roads with nothing but neon for company, its ache was unmistakably real.
“You might find me out tonight, with just a bottle for my friend,
Trying to drown the memory, that keeps runnin’ ‘round my head.”
The first night I heard that song, I was seventeen, soaked through from a Helmond rain, hunched in the corner of De Kei, the old pub near the train station. The regulars let me fiddle with the jukebox for a guilder or two, and by pure accident, I landed on Watson’s trembling baritone and those lonesome lines.
I remember, the bartender Giel—matte grey hair and hands quick as a West Texas wind—looked over and said, “Now there’s a song for gents with history.” I didn’t understand then, still too young and too green. But the sound haunted me: the gentle shudder of a Telecaster, the way Gene sang like he was confessing to nobody, the slow swirl of pedal steel twisting sorrow into something almost pretty.
In Helmond, country music always felt like an outsider’s secret—music for people who watched the world rather than ran with it. On that damp night, “Drinking My Way Back Home” became my own secret anthem.
“Every glass I raise, every step I roam,
I’m drinking my way, slow and alone,
Drinking my way back home.”
The thing about Watson’s voice is how honest it is—never desperate, never showy, just clear as rain on a mud road. That subtle heartbreak: the idea that returning home isn’t triumph, but sorrow, desperation with a glint of hope.
Through my twenties, as I bounced from gig to gig, from little smoky clubs in Eindhoven to raucous weddings in Deurne, I carried that song like a lucky coin—or maybe a wound. Whenever I’d feel set adrift, I’d hum those words, picturing a one-lane highway and neon motel lights flickering over nothing but regret and the faint promise that somewhere, someone’s porch light might still be shining for me.
I suppose that’s what’s always struck me about this song: it’s not about the thirst, it’s about what’s lost—that bittersweet, bottomless hunger for return, knowing you might never fully get back what you left behind. It was about the ache to make things right in a world that doesn’t deal in second chances.
There’s a verse, less quoted, that never fails to strike me:
“I see her in the mirror, in the bottom of my glass,
Every swallow tastes of regret and of the past.”
People talk about lyricism in country music, and we all praise the storytellers. But in these modest lines, there’s the whole shape of sorrow: the way you chase what you cannot reclaim, sip by bitter sip. It’s not self-pity—it’s facing the dark honestly, with a drink, yes, but also with a bit of steel in the voice.
The Netherlands in the late seventies was a world apart from the honky-tonk sceneries of Americain country music. Yet, oddly enough, the pining and yearning in Watson’s song felt at home in Helmond—a town shaped by factories, quiet determination, and the flutter of longing for elsewhere. My friends thought I was odd for loving these American laments, but gradually, through patience and a few midnight singsongs after long nights, I converted a few. We’d gather, weathered and a little homesick even in our own country, and play that song—raising a glass not only to the past but to the memory of believing we could always find our way back.
And isn’t that what keeps the rare country songs alive? Not the radio play, nor the stardom, but the quiet way they keep pace with our own hearts—coming back around just when we need them, like a long-lost friend on a dark walk home.
“Drinking My Way Back Home” doesn’t try to resolve the pain. It doesn’t tie it up with a bow. It simply sits with you, warm and sorrowful, offering a hand on the long trudge back through your bad choices and lost loves. For me—Kroes, Helmond’s oddball with a cowboy hat and a burning love for songs that never topped the charts—it’s the truest song I know.
So tonight, as the wind kicks up off the canal and the sky bruises to indigo, I hum Watson’s words again. And like always, I find myself a little less lost. Here’s to you, Gene Watson. Here’s to drinking our way back home.
– Kroes den Bock