There’s a peculiar ache that comes from discovering a rare country song—a song that seems to know parts of you that you’ve never shown, as if it existed before you did. I want to talk about a song that’s been a silent companion through the murkier, raw-boned stretches of my life; a song that’s not echoed in bars across the world or piped over supermarket speakers, but one that has, for reasons I’ll try to untangle, come to define me far more than the hits ever could.
The song is “Someday Soon” by Ian Tyson, recorded by Suzy Bogguss in 1989. Now, you might argue Bogguss’s version found a little airplay, but it never set the world on fire. It hovers just on the edge of memory, like something whispered across the plains or drifting down a long empty highway. That’s exactly where I found it, late one night, tuning through the hiss and tremble of an old AM radio, bundled up in a weathered coat, somewhere between Eindhoven and the edge of my own patience.
I was young, and young men in Helmond—at least the sort who fancy themselves country singers—don’t often find themselves swept away by ballads of restless hearts in Wyoming. But when Bogguss’s voice lilted over those lines:
> “He loves his damned old rodeo as much as he loves me,
> Someday soon, goin’ with him someday soon…”
I realized that exile, longing, and the impossible pull of the horizon wasn’t just an American invention. It was a human one.
When I first heard that refrain, I was twenty-two and restless. My father had spent his whole life managing a steelworks, and I was supposed to bend to something solid and steady myself. But all I wanted was to escape the certainty of workaday life. The steel mill’s thump echoed in my bones—steady, sure, but somehow funereal. I longed, not for rodeos or Wyoming, but for anything that was out of reach, for a promise that lay somewhere past the next Dutch village, or just past a chord change on my battered old guitar.
It’s easy to romanticize the narrator of “Someday Soon” as a young woman besotted with a cowboy, but in those harmonies, I heard my own mother’s fear for me—the way she’d look at me when I spoke of packing my guitar and trying my luck playing smoky bars in Eindhoven, or maybe even crossing the channel. The song’s mother warns:
> “Oh, but my mama’s so afraid I’ll be alone
> Out there in the wild unknown…”
It’s primal, that motherly fear—a fear of loss, of a world that doesn’t care for dreamers or wanderers, of children who follow wild-eyed cowboys, or, in my case, the siren call of the country blues. That line used to wind through me, a gentle admonition married to hope: maybe, just maybe, if you love something enough—the rodeo, the road, the song—it won’t consume you.
Looking back, I see now how clumsy and desperate my early grasping after freedom really was. I idolized those who risked everything, packing up and leaving, blinded by love or foolishness or both. I ached to believe that just stepping onto the highway would set me free from the weight of expectation. But what “Someday Soon” taught me—slowly, insistently, over years—is that every escape has a cost, and that cost is almost always love left behind.
I’ve listened to that song countless times through heartbreaks both minor and seismic. There have been nights when I knelt on my studio floor, surrounded by rejected lyrics and empty bottles, and that gentle, unpretentious melody reminded me that yearning is not just a wound, but a gift. “Someday Soon” doesn’t judge its dreamers, and it doesn’t condemn the ones who wait. It just holds them both, compassionately, in the slow measure of time.
> “He’s got that wanderlust in his blood
> And she ain’t never gonna tie him down
> Someday soon, goin’ with him someday soon…”
That’s the part I’d sing to myself, not because I wanted to run away—though I did—but because I wanted to believe you could follow love without losing yourself, that it was possible to honor both longing and loyalty.
When you chase your muse as stubbornly as I have, you collect scars. There are years lost to bad habits and worse lovers, to doubts that breed in the empty moments between applause and morning silence. If there are ghosts on the roads of Helmond, it’s because some of us never truly arrived. We carry that ache in our songs, and we pray that someone, somewhere, hears themselves in a line you offer.
You might ask why “Someday Soon” and not another. Why this particular relic of a song that never broke through? Because sometimes the songs less traveled ring truer. Because they’re for us—the ones who didn’t fit, or who had dreams that didn’t materialize, or who’ve known the ache of standing at the edge of the familiar, longing for the impossible.
In the cracked glass of my youth, “Someday Soon” played out again and again. Now, I sing it slow and quiet, maybe late at night at the Café De Keizer or alone, when no one’s listening but the ghosts. It reminds me there’s beauty in not belonging, in loving what the world doesn’t recognize. That the true country song isn’t a hit or a chart-topper—it’s the small comfort of words that meet you where you are, and mend you for just long enough to take one more step toward the morning.
May you find your song out there, rare and unfinished, waiting for you to listen.
Kroes den Bock