Music in January 2025
I am half a year behind as usual, but here is my first monthly playlist of the year. I’m not going to run through the list of all the songs like I used to—I think I have very little to add which isn’t already in the music itself, and that’s not the point of sharing it anyway. I will just point out a couple of highlights:
I got Jimmy Ruffin’s What Becomes of the Brokenhearted stuck in my head for a good couple of weeks on account of its prominent use in the pilot of For All Mankind, a truly delightful show and one of the better uses of soundtrack in storytelling.
I almost always end up putting America’s greatest lyricist, John Darnielle, on here, but this time I’ve managed to put him in under three different band names. It only seemed appropriate to begin 2025, a year that I was already tired of by the end of January, with the defiantly, cynically hopeful This Year.
I have not yet watched the TV adaptation of Station Eleven, but I have read the novel, and the post-apocalyptic folk concocted for the show by Dan Romer actually does make me want to get up and dance, despite the dark.
The Drip is just a real good rock song.
Across My Jaw has an instrumental melody I am a little obsessed with.
Magdalena Bay’s album Imaginal Disk is one of the best albums of last year, in a very spacy, brain-damaged way.
I just came across Barrie and immediately loved their work.
Exploding feels strangely encouraging in this stifling moment.
Deb Talan and Steve Tannen’s band The Weepies, and their solo work, consistently delivers on the promise of their name. Their 2008 album, Hideaway, is well worth hearing in its entirety, but Orbiting and All This Beauty stand out, and Talan’s Growing Up is a brilliant case of a song becoming more sentimentally heavy by being up-tempo, which is not usually how I experience music.
Olsen olsen is a long, slow, echoey build, but it arrives at a melody piping in from Elysium, culminating in a triumphant march that disappears gradually around the corner of the clouds of glory.
