I’m writing this up a week or so ahead of when it runs — the holidays are the holidays, so I don’t want to wait until the last moment and then miss my chance, you know? — but, as things stand right now and probably will through the end of the year, these are the last songs on my 2025 playlist. (Earlier installments can be found here, here, here, and here.)
I actually intended to end with the “Final Form”/”Stay Away From Me” pairing, because I liked the idea of the last song on the playlist being called “Stay Away From Me,” but then I found some more songs that stuck in my head and, anyway, plans are there to be changed. So, here are the final 20 songs from the playlist, which you can find here if you still have Spotify; otherwise, most of December was spent listening to Christmas songs or Suede’s “Elephant Man,” for reasons that escape me.
I’ve talked before about how utterly arbitrary my annual playlists are — it’s music that I’ve discovered this year and become obsessed with for some period of time, except when it’s music that I’ve known for awhile and become obsessed with all over again, except with it’s neither of those things and just something that I wanted to add to the playlist — and, with this latest batch of 50 songs (another arbitrary thing! Why do I share the lists here in batches of 50? I have no idea; I did it once and it stuck), I broke another of my self-imposed rules for reasons that basically boil down to remembering that it doesn’t have to be that dish: namely, I added a second song by the same artist to the same list. In my defense, “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” by Raye is a great song, and I apologize for nothing.
Anyway, here’s the latest update from my 2025 playlist. (The playlist itself is here, and the previous three installments of the list on this site are here, here, and here.) May you find something new on here that you love, too.
It struck me, admittedly too long after the fact, that the music I was listening to as I walked to the Javits Center each day of this year’s New York Comic Con was a surprisingly good read on where my mood was for each of those days. I was, to put it politely, low key terrified about how this year’s show would go purely because last year’s NYCC was a very stressful affair for me on any number of levels; even the prospect that this year’s could have compared was enough to leave me pre-emptively exhausted and upset even before I set foot in New York again.
(It was not that bad; in fact, as I told someone Sunday night with no small amount of surprise, I actually think it went well, which… I didn’t see coming…?)
Anyway – the playlists of my (short) walk to the convention center each of the mornings of the show:
Wednesday
Day one — technically, day zero, because it’s an industry-only day that is open only to comic professionals while much of the show is still being constructed elsewhere — and this song felt as much like psychic protection as statement of intent: “Getting used to say no is cunty” and “Setting boundaries is cunty” is the kind of message that my subconscious was probably screaming listen to this before you end up with a full day, none of which is your actual work. Feel the stress at play!
Thursday
Again, the stress is in play, and what better sums up the lowkey mania of expecting to walk into a day of chaos (it was, to no small degree) than a rowdy quasi-punk song that has a bunch of people shouting “Keeping the dream/keeping the dream/keeping the dream alive!” over and over again? (I did think, as I was listening to this, that there’s no small amount of irony to me listening to that chant as I was walking into a show based around fandom where the dream is all encompassing.)
Friday
Like I said, Thursday was a pretty rough day for behind the scenes reasons, and I went into the show Friday aware that I needed to psych myself up. Enter, then, De La Soul demanding that I rock it like rocket fuel. I adore this song and very particularly chose it in an attempt to get myself in the fightin’ mood for everything that may have laid ahead. It worked, as far as attempts to get myself in the mood go — but as things worked out, Friday was nowhere near as bad as I’d feared anyway. Maybe DJ Shadow et al worked magic I didn’t even see coming.
Saturday
No prep music on Saturday; I had breakfast and walked to the show with a friend. (I can’t even imagine what I would have listened to, had the option been available.)
Sunday
It was at this point where I knew, oddly, that things were going to be okay and I was perhaps even having a good show. By which I mean, I was maybe a minute into this song and I could feel myself relax and I thought, oh wait, things are better, aren’t they? This song is a piece of magic for me, something that lets me know that there are good things out there and joy and happiness in the world. From 31 seconds in through, maybe, the 1:44 mark, it’s literally perfection for me and, again, I chose this song without thinking and it felt as if it was a sign from my subconscious that everything was going well and I could exhale and breathe normally again.
I’ve written before about the fact that the first album I bought for myself was Flood by They Might Be Giants, when I was the kind of 15-year-old who loved “Birdhouse in Your Soul” when I heard it on the radio and thought, they sound weird in a way that made my head buzz. Every 15-year-old thinks they’re weird to some degree, I think — I hope — but I was one of the 15-year-olds who thought that they were weird in that inexplicable sense of not knowing if I fit in, or who I was supposed to be. They Might Be Giants, even just from “Birdhouse in Your Soul” alone, sounded cartoonish and unrealistic and clumsy and angular, and something about all of that made me feel seen, although I didn’t think of things in those terms back then. Instead, I just wanted to hear more. So: I bought Flood.
There was something revelatory about the album, as soon as it started. The first track on the album is “Theme From Flood,” a short little tongue-in-cheek introduction that blew my mind for the most minor reason; the song ends with a literal introduction that goes, “It’s a brand new record/for 1990/They Might Be Giants’ brand new album/Flood,” and when I heard that, I remember being shocked: they were saying the year and it was the actual year I was listenng to it. It felt like magic.
Looking back — and especially from this vantage point of the digital era with its surprise drops of albums and music and a turnaround between creation and release that can be essentially instantaneous — it’s a genuinely silly reason to feel actual surprise or awe, but I really did feel both about the album being actually contemporary. I hadn’t put it together by that point, but I bought the album on vinyl and played it on my parents’ old record player, and up to that point, that had been home to music that was decades old even by that point. Even the idea of a vinyl record felt like a historical artifact in and of itself, a document of record that stood the test of time and most likely predated my very existence. That I could have bought one with my own money, and then have it identify itself as coming from that very year, felt dreamlike.
For some reason, I’ve been listening to They Might Be Giants a lot recently; it reminds me of a time when even the mundane has magic to it. I think that might have been what they were wanting to do all along, in their way.
I’m glad that I hit the entirely arbitrary 150 mark on my 2025 playlist before the end of the month, so I can share what my particular “Songs of the Summer” have been before the season falls into the bin underneath our big cosmic desk. For those that might not remember, every year I make a Spotify playlist of songs that are either new to me or that I’ve become newly obsessed with if I had heard them before, and I share them here in batches of 50 songs at a time; here are the first two entries of this year’s list. (Why 50? There is no method to my madness.)
Want to know what much of my June, July and August sounded like? Take a look.
So, what have I been listening to this year? I shared the start of my 2025 playlist awhile ago right here,and here’s the next 50 songs on it. Yes, Barbra Streisand shows up; I apologize for nothing: “Don’t Rain On My Parade” is a fucking tune.
It’s been awhile since I shared a playlist, in part because I started from scratch with the new year a few months back. (In addition, when I got sick, I just… didn’t listen to music at all for a few weeks, which probably should have been my biggest sign that something was wrong, but also meant that I wasn’t really adding anything to the list to get it to my entirely fictional threshold of 50 tracks before I share it here. So… later than I might have hoped, but here it is now.
For anyone who has no idea what I’m on about; every year for the last few years, I’ve made a Spotify playlist for the year that I add new discoveries, songs I’ve rediscovered, or just simply things I can’t get out my head to, as something akin to a musical diary of the year. It’s a throwaway project but a fun one, and I share the playlist every 50 entries here. You can see the beginnings of the list for 2025 below, and listen to the playlist itself right here.
In the couple of months, I’ve been listening to the song “I Have Been Floated” by the Olivia Tremor Control almost obsessively, over and over and over again. It was something that I found almost by accident, adding it to a playlist initially because I liked the organ hook and moving on, only for the song to take root in my brain and settle in for the long haul.
(To speak to how little I was really paying attention to it at first, when it started playing on a loop in my head, I couldn’t remember what song it actually was, just the melody; I went back through everything I’d been listening to to try and find it, going, it’s definitely got to be something I heard in the last couple of days, right? I’ve not just made this tune up, have I?)
Somewhere in the middle of the third or fourth day of listening to the song for a third or fourth time, I realized that this was something I do entirely unintentionally; become obsessed with something in the short term and loop it, revisiting it time after time to try and understand it on a level that unlocks something inside my brain. It’s most often music — with this song, it’s me realizing that the way the song plays with recurring elements is a masterclass in arrangement and production — but it can be anything: a TV show, a book, a comic, a movie. When I discovered the rom-com Rye Lane, I watched it three times in one weekend. I’ve watched Lovers Rock more times than I can remember, despite only seeing it for the first time three years ago, especially the “Silly Game” scene, which I rewind and watch again even while playing the movie through as a whole. It’s all about trying to get why it makes my brain itch.
This is, perhaps, a “me” thing — the desire to revisit until something feels fully understood and appreciated — but I doubt that I’m the only one who does it, somehow. Don’t all of us who have ever considered ourselves fans of anything have this gene inside our heads?
We’re close enough to the end of the year that I might as well finish up the 2024 playlist that I’ve shared once or twice during the year (okay, three times; it’s because I shared them in bunches of 50 songs at a time; there’s a formula!). As the year came to a close, I added less things to the playlist (intended to be new songs to me, or things I was becoming newly obsessed with after not listening to for awhile) because my attention was on things I’d already added, but nonetheless:
The actual playlist is here. If, by some strange circumstance, I add more songs between writing this post and the end of the year, you’ll find them here.
At this time of year, thoughts turn to holiday playlists, and the essential songs that have to make it on to every single one. (I shared mine earlier this week.) I had a thought the other day bemoaning the lack of good new Christmas songs, before I realized two things simultaneously:
I am old, and therefore almost destined to find so much of “new” music to be boring, dull, or just simply not my bag, daddio.
More than arguably any other music genre, the appeal of Christmas music is that it’s nostalgic and pulls you back to simpler, earlier times in your life. So finding “new” Christmas songs that appeal to you as much as songs you grew up with it… difficult, to say the least. (Which is to say, sorry Sabrina Carpenter and your Nonsense Christmas Song.)
That last one is something I should have realized sooner, because it’s a lesson I learned when I was a kid myself. There were many Christmas traditions in my house growing up, which is almost certainly why I’m such a holiday fiend to this day. One of the major ones, though, was that when we did the decorations for the living room and the rest of the house, we would listen to Christmas music, and if at all possible, that would start with the music my mother grew up listening to at that time of year — which is to say, Nat King Cole’s Christmas album.
I say, “if at all possible,” because there was a period where the album was gone for some reason. Maybe it was destroyed, or misplaced? I don’t remember what happened to it, but I do remember that a replacement was eventually purchased after a couple of years, and it was clear the difference it made in her experience just hearing him sing “The Christmas Song” again. It was what completed the whole thing for her; without that song, it wasn’t really Christmas.
I’m the same. Not just with “The Christmas Song” (I learned from the best, and was taught at a young age), but with “Merry Xmas Everybody” and “I Wish It Could be Christmas Everyday” and at least half of the Phil Spector Christmas album. That’s not to say that new songs can’t be added to that must-listen list, because they can — things like Low’s “Just Like Christmas,” The Blind Boys of Alabama’s “Last Month of the Year” and The Executor’s “Christmas is a Joyful Day” have all achieved that goal since I was a kid — but the core songs, those ones that get played the most and induce the strongest festive feelings… all of them come from way back, and remind me of the wonder that you feel most strongly when things were simpler, happier, and I didn’t have to worry about taking time off work in order to celebrate everything appropriately.
