Click here for my 2025 Top Ten playlist.
The wheel is turning. I’m 71 years old. Every future day lived is a day that has passed. Today is a fleeting moment with a challenge to find meaning and beauty.
That’s not me, I don’t talk like that, it’s the title of a Moody Blues album. It made me sound deep for a minute, though, didn’t it?
I’ve always found meaning and beauty in new music. My whole life has been spent bubbling over with enthusiasm for my latest favorite bands, the best new album, a perfect song, an electrifying performance. I love sharing these playlists.
But I’m being beaten down by the music industry, by the modern world, by enshittification, by slop both human and AI.
For this year’s top ten list, I’m giving in to nostalgia.
Don’t misunderstand. As always, this year’s playlist only contains music released in 2025, but there’s a haunted echo of the past in many of the songs that appealed to me this year.
Will you like any of them? Will you listen more than once to any song released in 2025? Beside the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack, obviously that’s an exception, but anything else?
I grew up on songs repeated over and over on the radio until we had them memorized and they became part of the world’s culture, still shared today as “classic rock.” We flipped albums on the turntable and every nuance of every song was burned into our brains because we could only afford a few records every month. Everyone knew every song at dances. Music was built into our politics and protests.
It felt like music mattered.
Now the music world has splintered into a thousand niches. People go to concerts and festivals to see each other and be seen, to chat with their friends and scroll on their phones, with the music as wallpaper for the social scene instead of the main event. As our world speeds up and our attention spans shrink, there’s almost no new music that will still be played a year from now, much less fifty years from now.
Spotify is getting worse for casual listening, a mess of AI slop and enshittified recommendations. It’s run by a wealthy white male, Daniel Ek, who has an appetite for investing in AI military weapons development. A few bands yanked all their music from Spotify as a protest against billionaire craziness. One of them was the most interesting band of the decade, King Gizzard, so none of their songs are on my Spotify Top Ten list.
I’m the old guy sitting in my rocker on the porch, shaking my fist at the kids and yelling, Quiet, I’m trying to listen! Also, get off of my lawn.
The first concert I ever saw was Strawberry Alarm Clock performing at the Hoover High School auditorium, the school for big kids across the street from my junior high school in Glendale. It was 1968, I was in 8th grade, and this was a band with a big hit, Incense and Peppermints, a quintessential piece of psychedelic rock that was one of the defining songs of the 1967 Summer of Love.
They were a local band but I’m not sure I knew that. What I knew was that I had heard their song on the radio, which made them famous by definition. I was a sheltered nerd and seeing rock music performed live that afternoon was roughly the coolest thing I had ever done.
It’s nearly sixty years later and some version of the band has been performing more or less continuously. Monsters is their first new music in more than a decade but – it’s a good song! I like it! It sounds like 2025, not 1967. And could there be anything more nostalgic than my first ever rock concert?
No nostalgia here, these are youngsters. Goose has been touring for more than ten years, building a devoted audience around unique performances and impeccable musicianship. 2025 brought two studio albums and one generous recording of Madison Square Garden concerts on Spotify, but like a lot of bands, Goose is mostly sidestepping Spotify. Instead you can listen to every Goose concert on Nugs.net and find hours of concert material on YouTube and Bandcamp.
You don’t need me to weigh in on Taylor Swift or KPop Demon Hunters but it would be foolish for me not to include songs from each this year. I have a weakness for perfect pop songs. Opalite and Golden are perfect pop songs.
Ah, my old mates, so many years spent under their thrall! But they ran out of steam a long time ago and started cashing in on nostalgia with tour after tour performing the same twenty songs, never quite a parody of themselves but with nothing new to offer.
At least they sound like they’re having fun on this swampy shuffle, included on a tribute album to zydeco pioneer Clifton Chenier. It’s the first song of theirs in many years that I wanted to hear more than once.
Tedeschi Trucks Band is a miracle. Susan Tedeschi channels soulful vocals from Bonnie Raitt and Janis Joplin, and adds serious guitar chops. Husband Derek Trucks was a longtime member of the Allman Brothers Band and brings all of Duane Allman’s talent and emotion to his slide guitar playing. Their concerts are joyous, a twelve-piece ensemble playing a constantly changing mix of blues, rock, jazz, soul, gospel, funk, and country.
In 2015 they reached out to Joe Cocker and suggested re-creating the iconic Mad Dogs & Englishmen film and concert from 1970. Sadly Cocker passed away before a show could be put together but Leon Russell worked with them to assemble musicians from the original show, including Rita Coolidge and Claudia Lennear, plus guest stars Chris Robinson, Doyle Bramhall II, Anders Osborne and more.
Tedeschi Trucks and guests performed the entire Mad Dogs & Englishmen show one night in 2015; the recording was finally released this year. On Feelin’ Alright, that’s Dave Mason singing the song he originally wrote for Traffic in 1968, with Leon Russell on piano. Magic!
Three bands from the 1970s that have not yet surrendered to the passage of time. Each stepped up in 2025 with strong albums that stand proudly with the others in their huge catalogs. Little Feat will be on a farewell tour in 2026. See them if you can.
A recording turned up on Spotify last month of a very young Pat Metheny playing at The Bottom Line in New York City in 1978, promoting Pat Metheny Group’s first album. Jazz fusion, Brazilian rhythms, and melodic improvisation with Metheny and Lyle Mays – ah, bliss! Listen while you can. The source of this album on Spotify is a widely bootlegged FM broadcast and it may get taken down if it’s unauthorized.
David Gilmour did a brief tour in 2024 promoting his album Luck and Strange, and released The Luck and Strange Concerts live album in 2025. The shows were some of the best he has ever done, perhaps including the years he spent touring as the leader of Pink Floyd. The backing band is exceptional, with standout contributions from his daughter Romany on vocals and harp. Gilmour’s guitar playing is liquid, lyrical, and phenomenal, and the live performances of material released since Pink Floyd are even better than the studio versions. I picked out Wish You Were Here, one of the best known Pink Floyd numbers, but really the whole album deserves a listen.
Bruceb News will be on hiatus for the holidays. Proceed with caution to 2026. If you have not enjoyed any of my articles this year, blame the training data. Happy holidays!