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As always, I have eschewed sharing my favorite songs of the year via Spotify Wrapped not least because I do not even have Spotify. And good thing too! It turns out that in 2025 the musical streaming service implemented a feature to determine each user’s listening age by scrutinizing the five-year span of music with which they most engaged. It’s how people I knew were deemed to have listening ages in their 60s and in their 90s and how Charli XCX, vanguard of modern pop music, apparently had a listening age of 75. Almost every song on my year-end mixtape, on the other hand, is from 2025. And even if you take the other two and when they were released and/or recorded and do some quick arithmetic, my listening age turns out to be approximately three-and-a-half. Granted, my mixtape includes music from baby boomers, millennials, and a member of Gen X. And yes, if my favorite album of the year was not Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem” (one of my five thousand favorite memories of going to Venice in the fall was seeing the Venetian mom in the Conad grocery singing along with “Abracadabra”on the store sound system to her infant in her stroller) then it was Bruce Springsteen’s heretofore unreleased “Streets of Philadelphia” Sessions from 1994, so not exactly cutting edge, never mind unpredictable. And no, this mixtape does not take into account just how much Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac I listened to this year. Not that it matters. Because regardless of Spotify’s data mining operation, remember, listening age is only a state of mind.
Here were my favorite songs of 2025. (Except where embedded, click on the title of the song to listen.)
My 2025 Mixtape
Clams Casino, Brian Dunne. The anti-enshittification anthem we need.
How Bad Do U Want Me, Lady Gaga. Yes, Gaga won an Oscar for “Shallow” from “A Star Is Born,” and sure, she was also nominated for an Oscar for “Hold My Hand” from “Top Gun: Maverick,” but “How Bad Do U Want Me” is her greatest contribution to the American cinema songbook in so much as it is the theme song to the great 80s Marisa Tomei romantic comedy that was never made.
Enjoy Your Life, Romy. I only learned of this 2023 dance floor ode to joie de vivre when I saw the versatile UK artist perform it while opening for Kylie Minogue in April and I cannot think of a better bookend to our opening cut nor a finer message to take into the fresh hell of 2026.
Say Goodbye, Tell No One, Kathleen Edwards. The rare six-minute rock song that soars so high it still somehow only feels like a three-minute rock song.
Glasgow, The Mekons. As ever, the legendary British post-punk band’s new record pulses with righteous fury (the opening cut is called “The Western Design,” for God’s sake) and this love letter to a place that comes across hard to love is what most hit this American square in the gut.
Glasgow, The Mekons. As ever, the legendary British post-punk band’s new record pulses with righteous fury (the opening cut is called “The Western Design,” for God’s sake) and this love letter to a place that comes across hard to love is what most hit this American square in the gut.
Afterlife, Sharon Van Etten. Do I believe in an afterlife? Damn, man, I don’t know, I really don’t, and rather than bringing clarity, being alive for almost 50 years now has only left me more uncertain. And that’s why I found Van Etten’s big screen treatment of this track with her Attachment Theory band so moving; she isn’t sure either, but damn, man, she wants to believe. And getting to hear her sing it live at The Salt Shed in May, where she evinced more of an earnest goth presence than I had anticipated, made me feel that desire to believe even more.
Maybe I Don’t Know You, Bruce Springsteen. In a year that has been so improbable, as Vin Scully once said, the impossible has happened – that is, Bruce Springsteen himself is once again responsible for the best Bruce Springsteen Song of the Year. (I wrote a lot more about this one here.)
Color of Night, James McMurtry. Getting old, my dad likes to say in quoting Jimmy Buffett, is not for sissies, and in this track, the reliably incisive singer/songwriter brings it to life not through melancholy rumination nor anthemic defiance but a kind of middle ground, a knowing let’s-get-on-with-it semi-embrace.
Gateleg, Fust. If it’s possible to make a down-to-earth alt-country epic, this is it. As if Springsteen hailed from North Carolina instead of New Jersey.
It’ll Do, Hailey Whitters. My Iowa homegirl released something akin to a concept album based around her native state, but it was this not-necessarily-related Nashville banger that stuck with me most. I love how it’s an homage to 90s boot scootin’ boogies but not at all retro (“this song ain’t got no fiddle / but it’s still got that sizzle”); if they had played this on KJJY, Iowa’s Country Station, back in the mid-90s at the pizza place where I worked, I might have gotten into country music sooner.
Maybe I Don’t Know You, Bruce Springsteen. In a year that has been so improbable, as Vin Scully once said, the impossible has happened – that is, Bruce Springsteen himself is once again responsible for the best Bruce Springsteen Song of the Year. (I wrote a lot more about this one here.)
Color of Night, James McMurtry. Getting old, my dad likes to say in quoting Jimmy Buffett, is not for sissies, and in this track, the reliably incisive singer/songwriter brings it to life not through melancholy rumination nor anthemic defiance but a kind of middle ground, a knowing let’s-get-on-with-it semi-embrace.
Gateleg, Fust. If it’s possible to make a down-to-earth alt-country epic, this is it. As if Springsteen hailed from North Carolina instead of New Jersey.
It’ll Do, Hailey Whitters. My Iowa homegirl released something akin to a concept album based around her native state, but it was this not-necessarily-related Nashville banger that stuck with me most. I love how it’s an homage to 90s boot scootin’ boogies but not at all retro (“this song ain’t got no fiddle / but it’s still got that sizzle”); if they had played this on KJJY, Iowa’s Country Station, back in the mid-90s at the pizza place where I worked, I might have gotten into country music sooner.
Not Safe for Work
d£aler, Lola Young. A pop song written in blood. My favorite song of the year.
Call Me, Anna of the North. Per the Interweb, Norway’s Anna of the North, née Anna Lotterud, is 36, born in 1989, and so she would, indeed, have a memory of telling objects of her affection to call her. And I can’t say I have ever heard a pop song that has so utterly embodied both the seeming offhand lightness of that phrase and how in reality it is always more fraught than a soul can bear.
How Bad Do U Want Me, Lady Gaga. Yes, Gaga won an Oscar for “Shallow” from “A Star Is Born,” and sure, she was also nominated for an Oscar for “Hold My Hand” from “Top Gun: Maverick,” but “How Bad Do U Want Me” is her greatest contribution to the American cinema songbook in so much as it is the theme song to the great 80s Marisa Tomei romantic comedy that was never made.
Enjoy Your Life, Romy. I only learned of this 2023 dance floor ode to joie de vivre when I saw the versatile UK artist perform it while opening for Kylie Minogue in April and I cannot think of a better bookend to our opening cut nor a finer message to take into the fresh hell of 2026.
