About three months ago my friend Jeffery hooked me up with an email distribution list an old buddy of his does called “Tune of the Day.” It’s pretty much what it sounds like: his buddy (who prefers his anonymity) has a stupendous music collection and sends out a different track every day — mostly guitar based rock from the sixties and seventies — in an email that includes a bit of context, historical or personal, for each song. A lot of it is stuff I have never heard, or not heard in so long I all but forgot about it. When it comes to the music I was listening to in high school, I remember what I was listening to but not always why.

Take Traffic. Their second album was on my turntable pretty much my entire sixteenth year, though now I have to wonder what I was thinking, if not smoking. I recalled that year when TOTD dropped “Forty Thousand Headmen” into my queue a few weeks ago. I honestly have no idea what I thought that song meant then, though I listened to it repeatedly, on the headphones. That and a song called “Cryin to Be Heard” really made me feel lonely, or maybe that was just me being sixteen.

Within the year I had discovered country music, in the backwards way most of us did; the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo sent me to Merle Haggard, and from him I must have gotten interested in Hank Williams. There was an ad on TV then for an album of Hank’s greatest hits that I sent away for, and soon I was listening to that the way I had listened to Traffic. My loneliness had found its true expression in a song of Hank’s called “May You Never Be Alone Like Me”: “Like a bird that’s lost its mate in flight/I’m alone and o so blue tonight/Like a piece of driftwood on the sea/May you never be alone like me…”

You could argue that both Winwood and Williams were coming from a drug-addled place that compounded the lows (Hank liked booze, benzedrine and barbituates, while I suspect Stevie was doing whatever was going around; check out this picture of Traffic with Jimi and members of the Who for a visual confirmation) though I think Hank spoke from a despair deeper than mere detox could deal with. As Leonard Cohen sang in “Tower of Song,” “I said to Hank Williams: How lonely does it get?/Hank Williams hasn’t answered me yet.”

I still have both that Traffic album and that Hank Williams collection; they’re in a box somewhere in my basement. Let me know when you’re coming by; I’ll dust them off and bring them upstairs. I don’t feel so lonely anymore.