WHEN I MOVED out of the apartment, I discovered the extent of my hoarding over the years. No matter how many boxes of books I moved, no matter how many armfuls of coats and shirts I extracted, the task was endless. I worked day and night and still got nowhere with the thing.

The apartment was in some up-and-coming residential area in Tallinn, like Noblessner maybe, but farther inland, though no place is very far inland in Tallinn. I had outgrown the neighborhood though, it being taken over by hipsters 20 years my junior with tech jobs.

While doing the move, I stopped and helped myself to some refreshing water flavored with effervescent mint at a café bar in the building’s food court. Some kid in a flannel shirt called me an old man for sitting there. ‘Next you’re going to start talking about the Eighties,’ he said.

Outside, I paused in the courtyard to breathe beneath the palatial, intergalactic, honeycomb looking apartment terraces and balconies, made of brick, glass and iron. And that’s when I heard it, the unmistakable sound of the early Stones. The fuzz of the guitar, that stark beat.

But something was strange about this song, for I had never heard it before. It was a bit like ‘Tell Me’ crossed with ‘The Last Time.’ How could it be that I had never heard it? Surely it had popped up in some anthology. But no. Looking up at the brick work, I could see the band, projected high in black and white. Mick Jagger was up there singing, holding the microphone.

Then it occurred to me. This must have been one of Brian’s songs. Andrew Loog Oldham had said that Brian Jones had written a few songs that Jagger and Richards, the primary songwriting team, had snubbed. By Oldham’s telling, Jones’s output had been worthless junk. But girlfriend Linda Lawrence recalled otherwise. She said that Brian’s songs were brilliant.

This must have been one of those lost songs, leaked from the vaults at last, played by Tallinn hipsters from some upper floor pad in the digital future. They were still cool. I was old and in the way, but the Stones were young. Mr. Brian Jones, 57 years dead, still lived on. Some consolation it was to hear the Rolling Stones on that sad day. Again their music had saved me.