The Best of Me, 2025
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As I do every year, it's time to take a look back at some of the work I did in 2025 that I'm proud of. There's a lot of bad news out there these days, it can feel sometimes a little futile to spend my time on music and arts and culture when there's some really serious shit happening in the world, but I hope I can keep doing what I do and we can all survive and find joy in things.
- Obviously, my biggest project this year was my first book, Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore Club Music, which finally came out in August, many years after I first announced the project. If you've bought it, I'm incredibly grateful to you for supporting this labor of love and the city and the music it celebrates. If you haven't, I will point out that it's a pretty affordable little paperback, and my publisher Repeater Books is running a 50% off sale through December 31st. The rollout for the book has been a lot of fun, I did events with Normal's Books and Records and Red Emma's at the Baltimore Book Festival, Greedy Reads (some video footage here), Motor House (video footage here), and Idle Hour. I did interviews with Rinse FM, The Music Book Podcast, Music Book Club, and John's Music Blog. Last week I was a guest on Midday on WYPR, and you can now hear that interview in podcast form on streaming services. The book was reviewed by The Wire magazine, and Stereogum published a lengthy excerpt of a couple of key chapters.
- Speaking of Stereogum, I also wrote a fun look back at the Crazy Frog era for them.
- On the Baltimore Banner, I interviewed Lafayette Gilchrist and Dapper Dan Midas, and wrote pieces mourning and celebrating the lives of Susan Alcorn and Darsombra's Ann Everton.
- On Complex, I made lists of rapper/singer duos and country/rap collaborations, revamped my old list of the best remixes since 2000, and wrote about some of the most anticipated albums of 2025.
- Over on Spin, I did a lot more interviews than in previous years, including profiles of Yellowcard, Rise Against, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Elbow, Repelican, Haute & Freddy, Bones Owens, and Eyedress, and I also talked to Steve Rosenthal and Anna Canoni about the fascinating work of releasing Woody Guthrie's home recordings. We started the new weekly column Deep Cut Friday over the summer, and I've written about songs by Oasis, My Chemical Romance, Jeff Buckley, Tracy Chapman, John Mellencamp, Harry Nilsson, and Blondie. And I ranked the albums of a lot of artists, including Michael Jackson, Rush, Bjork, Elton John, Marianne Faithfull, Black Sabbath, Public Enemy, Matthew Sweet, and Van Halen,
- Here on Narrowcast, I've spent the last few weeks writing about my favorite albums, singles, remixes, and TV shows of 2025. Throughout the year I also posted lists of my favorite TV shows of the 1990s, my favorite hard rock and metal singles and mainstream rock singles of the 1980s, and my favorite artists of the 1970s. I started to make lists of my favorite movies of every year, starting with 2024 and have so far gone back to 2018. And I made lots of Deep Album Cuts playlists including The Kinks, Phish, Jill Sobule, Sly and the Family Stone, Roberta Flack, Luther Vandross, Angie Stone, The Beach Boys, and The S.O.S. Band.
- The book kind of took up a lot of my time and energy the last two years, so I didn't release much of my own music this year, but a few things came out. I released three Western Blot tracks: one original song, and covers of songs by Lalo Schifrin and Olivia Newton-John. And I played drums on Jack Reidy's "Clockwork," a song on his debut album Raw Deal that came out in March.
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on Sunday, December 21, 2025 at 3:14 PM.
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