I want to take you back to a quiet Sunday afternoon in late autumn, 1982. The leaves were the color of split apricots, cobblestones glistened under weak northern sunlight, and I’d just discovered the heartbreakingly beautiful “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” by John Prine. Now, to most folks, Prine’s name rings a couple of bells and then fades into the clang of other more radio-friendly crooners—but this song, this particular tune, never got top billing on Dutch radio. It nestled in the grooves of his album *German Afternoons*, like a secret note pressed in the pages of a worn-out diary.
Let me say this: nobody spoke to loneliness quite like Prine did. My own struggles with being alone started before I could even tell the difference between Hank Williams and Waylon Jennings. Despite being surrounded by people, sometimes—backstage after a show, with the scent of sweat and beer thick in the air—I felt like I’d been dropped on a moonlit field a thousand miles from the nearest running engine.
Prine sings in a voice as battered as a letter left out in the rain:
*“You come home late and you come home early
You come on big when you’re feeling small
You come home straight and you come home curly
Sometimes you don’t come home at all.”*
I remember, the first time I played this record, my old Technics deck spun it just a bit slow. The guitar and piano crept through my tiny apartment, which looked out over a canal you can only find here in the lowlands, and I wept. Truth was, I was fresh from a broken heart—she’d left mid-October for another man’s promise of Nashville lights, and all I got was her Polaroid and a lipstick-smeared whisky glass.
The Hunebedden don’t hold the echo Prine’s lyrics do. Because that song doesn’t just talk about loneliness, doesn’t just hint at it—it *moves* with it. Every time the chorus rolls around, I shiver:
*“It’s a mighty mean and a dreadful sorrow
It’s crossed the evil line today
How can you ask about tomorrow—
We ain’t got one word to say.”*
What is it about a country song that lets you excavate your own bones? To this day, I hear that line—“It’s a mighty mean and a dreadful sorrow”—and I see myself pacing the tiled kitchen at 2 AM, talking out loud to my shadow, asking it why it sticks so close when everybody else has grown distant.
But that’s what great country does: it names the ghosts you’re too ashamed to mention. For most of my twenties, I wore a coat of bravado: loud shirts, easy conversation, even easier laughter at parties. Yet inside there was this constant rumble, like a train I could hear but didn’t see. That’s what Prine gets at when he sings, “How can you ask about tomorrow—We ain’t got one word to say.” He’s not just talking about lovers at opposite ends of a long kitchen table; he’s talking about two sides of yourself in constant argument.
There’s an alchemy in a song that makes you less afraid of your own reflection. Sometimes, when gigs ended and the city outside was silent except for the far-off groan of a late-night tram, I’d needle-drop that track and just *listen*. I realized that the “speed of the sound of loneliness” is not a measure of how fast your lover vanished from your bed—it’s how fast your heart can harden and heal again, sometimes in the span of a single sunrise. And sometimes it doesn’t.
I’ve had my share of dark nights in Helmond, with the city’s orange glow crawling through the half-closed blinds, the kind of nights where you press your palm flat to the cold glass and ask the dark questions you’d never admit sober. On those nights, Prine’s voice didn’t come as consolation. It came as recognition. The song becomes a friend you trust precisely because it doesn’t try to fix you; it just knows your shape.
*“You’re out there running just to be on the run.”*
It seems so simple, but any person who’s tried to escape themselves knows how hard the running gets. Back when gigs were scarce and I thought I’d written my last good verse, I’d put “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” on repeat and try to write *something*—anything—that felt as honest for me as that song did for Prine.
If you find a song like that, one you can wear even when you’re stripped naked by loss or doubt, you hold onto it. I know some might say it’s just a sad cowboy tune, but for me, it’s an honest roadmap through the fog. There’s comfort in knowing someone else not only survived that kind of sorrow but could shape it into art.
Now, when the world crowds in—when my name is misspelled on the festival flyer, when love shakes loose or memory grows heavy—I come back to this song. I let Prine’s lonesome poetry stitch me together, note by note. “You come home late and you come home early…”—ain’t we all trying to come home, somehow?
So here’s to the rare ones—songs like “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” that will never top the charts, but will outlast every fashion and every fancy. Here’s to being unafraid of sorrow, to calling it by name, and dancing anyway.
Keep listening, and keep the record spinning.
Kroes den Bock