I remember the first time I heard Tom T. Hall’s “That Song is Driving Me Crazy.” The year was 1974—Helmond was a different town then, even if the canals and brickyards stubbornly held on to their misty Dutch character. I was young, and the world felt wide open, but already shaped by longing and memory—two things country music seems to savour more than any other genre.
“That Song is Driving Me Crazy” didn’t become a huge hit in Europe, and even in Nashville it wasn’t spoken of in the same breath as Tom T. Hall’s “Harper Valley PTA” or “The Year Clayton Delaney Died.” It’s a song easy to overlook, tucked quietly away among the loud, brash heartbreakers and highway anthems. But sitting late one night in our old farmhouse at the edge of Helmond, fiddling with radio dials, I found that song one rainy evening and it changed the way I thought about country music—and myself.
The chorus felt like it was meant for me:
*“That song is driving me crazy
I gotta hear it again
First time I heard it I was with some friends
It’s a simple little song you can sing along with a real good country beat
That song is driving me crazy, I gotta hear it again…”*
There was nothing glitzy about it. The melody sauntered in with a Dixieland flavor, a touch more upbeat than his usual baritone ballads. Lyrically, it wandered somewhere between nostalgia and self-awareness. It spoke of the way songs embed themselves in your mind—not always because they’re clever or grand, but because they remind you of people, places, moments. That’s something we don’t often admit: how the simplest jingle, the most meandering lyric, can pack your heart tight with memory.
For me, 1974 was the year I learned how hard it is to let your childhood go. The world was changing quickly—my father’s voice echoed less in our home, replaced by the sound of machines, the hum of the Philips radio, the footsteps of strangers who had started moving into Helmond as the city grew. My mother didn’t laugh as often, and I began to feel—without understanding it fully—the loss of whatever innocence lingered in those thick-walled rooms.
*“The guy’s got a strange voice and it’s easy to see
They gave him the money and the record company
A simple old song but it kinda gets to me
It’s got a real good country beat…”*
Sometimes music hits you the hardest not because it speaks of loss, but because it soaks up the color of days gone by. Tom T. Hall’s oddball tune did exactly that. It was an unpretentious celebration—almost a parody—of catchy country music itself, the sort of novelty song that’s easy to write off. But as a wanna-be songwriter in the lowlands, it was a revelation to me: you didn’t always need to chase poetry, or wring out the pain, or write about dying cowboys under a bleeding sunset. Sometimes the beauty was in admitting how trivial, how addictive, how *human* the simplest melody could be.
That autumn of ‘74, I played “That Song is Driving Me Crazy” until my siblings protested. I’d stomp through the house singing “That song is driving me crazy, I gotta hear it again!” until my mother—exasperated—told me, in her sweet Brabant accent, “Als je die plaat nog één keer draait, ga je maar op zolder zitten, hoor!” (If you play that record one more time, you’d better sit in the attic!) And sometimes I did, gazing out the window at rain falling over the cow pasture, teaching myself guitar by copying the rhythm of Tom T. Hall’s simple strum.
When you listen closely to the verses, you realize that Hall is poking fun at his own craft, but also honoring the timelessness of “simple little songs.” It’s a music hall, a kitchen table, a barn radio, nostalgia compressed into less than three minutes. The song is filled with light—“banjo pickin’, guitar lickin’, man, they sound just great”—and, at the same time, completely unselfconscious about its corniness.
Years later, when I took the stage for my first real gig at a pub in Eindhoven, I snuck “That Song is Driving Me Crazy” into my set. Among a crowd more interested in Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson covers, it landed awkwardly at first—a strange choice, folks whispering, a Dutchman singing a half-forgotten American tune. But by the second chorus, smiles crept across faces. People sang along, even before they quite knew the words.
That’s the genius of the song: it overwrites your memory in real time, pulling you out of gloom and into camaraderie. Even now, nearly 50 years later, I see listeners respond to it with an involuntary laugh or tap of the toe. They remember the first song they ever obsessed over—not because it was great art, but because it was theirs.
When I talk to young musicians in Helmond, I always tell them: don’t chase trends, don’t try to be profound at every turn. Learn from Tom T. Hall—celebrate the accidental, the silly, the repetitive, the addictive. There is honest magic in a tune that simply makes you want to hear it again and again.
*“That song is driving me crazy,
I gotta hear it again,
I gotta hear it again…”*
So here’s to the forgotten songs—the toe-tappers, the cheerful oddities, the records that survive not because they win awards or top charts, but because they worm their way into our hearts. Tom T. Hall’s “That Song is Driving Me Crazy” isn’t the greatest country song of all time. But for a homesick Dutch kid, dreaming of Nashville while staring at the flat fields of Brabant, it was a reminder that music doesn’t need to be grand to be unforgettable. It just needs to feel like home.
Yours in song and memory,
Kroes den Bock