Liz Pelly wrote in The Guardian about making lists as a way to take stock of what you care about, instead of handing that work to an algorithm.
“This year, rather than letting a streaming service tell you what records were important to you simply because you played them the most on one app, consider taking the time to write a list based on what you actually connected with. Share it if you feel like it — even if it’s just a notes app screenshot or a scribbled, handwritten list that you photograph and share with a caption. Even if you only text or email it to some friends. Or if you prefer, write it in a notebook just for yourself and your archives.”
Here’s my list for 2025, arranged thematically rather than in order of preference. I’ve been writing about music for as long as I’ve been writing about anything. I listen to more music than most people I know who aren’t musicians. It’s just how I’m wired. Some readers ask me to write about music more often. Here we go.
1. Bach had a good year
James Ehnes and Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra: J.S. Bach: The Complete Violin Concertos (Analekta)
Nevermind, Bach: Goldberg Variations (Alpha Classics)
Chris Thile, Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 2 (Nonesuch)
If all the Bach you ever hear is Glenn Gould’s two recordings of the Goldberg Variations (1955 and 1981), you might not get around to hearing Bach’s sacred music, his music for choirs, his music for orchestras. Dance forms, breath and Biblical texts informed his music in ways that aren’t obvious from listening to a solo pianist. I didn’t plan to end the year celebrating three quite different recordings of Bach, but when I whittled my list down, here they were.
I still don’t think Canada appreciates what we have in James Ehnes, born to American parents in Brandon, MB. He’s one of the very best violinists in the world. On the night I started writing this he was playing at Carnegie Hall. He has a singing tone and a self-disciplined approach to dramatic shading. Most years he visits the National Arts Centre Orchestra here in Ottawa at least once. Here he plays Bach concertos for one, two, or three violins, with his close NAC friends Yosuke Kawasaki and Jessica Linnebach, as well as other core repertoire. No orchestra knows Ehnes or this repertoire better than NACO. The soloists are bright, tuneful and sympatico. This album could have been made 50 years ago, and I mean that in the best way. I couldn’t find video of Ehnes with NACO, but here’s Ehnes playing Bach:
Nevermind is a French quartet — flute, violin, viola da gamba, which is like a cello, and a harpsichord or organ to fill in harmonies. They take Bach’s most famous keyboard work, the very same Goldberg Variations that Gould recorded twice, and split up its parts. Flute and violin take turns with the lead melody. The keyboardist is never assigned a melody and sometimes leaves the field clear to the other three, or to only the two string players. There’s a process to it, which most listeners will be wise to ignore, but the result is an intimacy and warmth that’s generally missing from expanded Goldbergs. There’s a bit of the slouchy feel of 90s alt-rock to it — a reaction that I assume would astonish Nevermind, who did not name themselves after the Nirvana album. I’ve heard so many versions of this piece, but this year I kept coming back to this one.
But if I had to name a favourite among these Bach recordings — perhaps even a favourite among all the albums in this year’s list — it would be Chris Thile’s performance, on mandolin, of music Bach wrote for solo violin. I know it sounds like a gimmick or stunt. Bear with me. This is Thile’s second turn at solo Bach. His first effort, Vol. 1, came out 12 years ago. It was stiff, correct, intimidated, forgettable. This one is another world.
Maybe the first thing you notice is the crowd sounds and the chirping birds on several tracks. Thile recorded the material in a bunch of non-traditional spots, including public parks. Sometimes the background sound even changes during a piece, evidence of different takes digitally spliced. Sometimes there are quite intrusive audio effects — echo, tape roar. But the big difference from 2013 is that Thile’s performances are so much looser and more assured. He picks Bach’s music up and hauls it into the arena of what’s possible on a mandolin, as determined by the way Thile grew up playing it in American bluegrass settings since grade school. He opens the new album, and Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor, with a whispered tremolo that lasts two minutes and is nowhere indicated in the violin part. It’s haunting.
I suppose it’s possible to view this all as some sort of offence against proper Bach. But Bach borrowed heavily from folk and dance sources and always paid close attention to the instruments that would play his stuff. I think he’d have been delighted. Whatever. The end product is breathtaking. Here’s Thile beatboxing his way into the Partita No. 3 in Tompkins Square Park.
2. Singers
Elton John & Brandi Carlile, Who Believes in Angels? (Interscope)
William Prince, Further From the Country (Six Shooter)
Rosalia, Lux (Columbia)
Florry, Sounds Like (Dear Life)
Brandi Carlile’s own 2025 solo album Returning to Myself showcases her ability to keep a distinctive style across a wide variety of song forms. But in the end there’s just more joy in her collaboration with Elton John, a friend and early influence. Another of Carlile’s talents is to inspire her elders, as we’ve seen with Joni Mitchell. That Elton sounds committed and joyful here is largely thanks to Carlile’s goading and encouragement. It’s more his album than hers, except that without her it’d be no album at all.
I saw William Prince as an opening act in a small Nashville venue a year ago, so it’s great to see he’s booked a tour of big plush-seat halls across Canada from February to April, and that most of those shows are on track to sell out. Clearly I’m catching up to something big. The gentle singer-guitarist from Peguis First Nation in Manitoba toughens his sound here, with a tight band and an elegant set of tunes about leaving home and heading into the big world.
If William Prince is a persuasive minimalist, Rosalia was the year’s big pop maximalist. The Spanish singer, who comes from flamenco roots in Barcelona, is wildly ambitious here: singing in 11 languages, Catalan, Sicilian, Ukrainian, German and more, some of which she learned for this album, with the London Symphony Orchestra playing arrangements by Caroline Shaw (who was on my music list last year) and others. Bjork shows up. Patti Smith reads a poem. Rosalia namechecks Clarice Lispector as an influence. Remember when artists used their albums to build a world — Kate Bush, Bjork, Prince, Queen? This is that and maybe more. It doesn’t sound like a term paper because the hard emotional edge of flamenco in Rosalia’s singing electrifies every song. Her own spring and summer stadium tour, weighted heavily toward the Spanish-speaking world — two nights in London, five in Mexico City — has one Canadian stop, June 13 in Toronto. It’ll be big.
Florry, a Philadelphia band led by a 24-year-old force of nature named Francie Medosch, works leaner, lower to the ground. Its ambling jams are built on actual guitar riffs, which the band plays as if they just came up with the idea. In interviews, she hints at broader influences and projects that won’t sound much like Florry, but in the meantime there’s this. It sounds dangerous, like friends thinking about something together.
3. No words
Al Foster, Live at Smoke (Smoke Sessions)
Gabriel Kahane, Jeffrey Kahane, The Knights, Heirloom (Nonesuch)
Al Foster was the great utility drummer of American jazz for 50 years. He’d turn up with Tommy Flanagan, Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, Joe Lovano, Herbie Hancock. A big man who didn’t talk much, he had a unique groove, responsive to what the rest of the band was playing, relentlessly driving.
In January he played an 82nd birthday gig at Smoke in uptown Manhattan, and a few months later he was dead, and all of us are bereft. Live at Smoke documents that final week, with Chris Potter on saxophone, Brad Mehldau on piano, Joe Martin on bass. Each of the youngsters, now in their 50s, brought a tune. The rest is standards. The pleasure is in the conversation. Potter and Mehldau, who can both tend to run on, are concise and pointed here, more persuasive than on some of their own albums. The promise of jazz is that on any given night you might hear something special. Most nights that promise lets you down gently. Here it delivers.
Gabriel Kahane is a composer and singer-songwriter who thinks about a lot of things and, therefore, has a Substack. In 2016, trying to process Donald Trump’s election, he got on a train and started talking to people. Several thousand miles later he wrote a New York Times op-ed and made an album. But that’s another story. We are gathered here to consider Kahane’s latest, a big American concerto written for his father, the pianist Jeffrey Kahane, and the New York City chamber orchestra The Knights.
The work struggles with memory and individuation — how does a California polymath process his parents’ folk and classical influences, not to mention what was brewing in Europe a generation earlier, when his Jewish grandmother left Germany? What that sounds like is a big, unabashedly American concerto that juxtaposes passages of cool abstraction with warm melody and show-stopping fireworks. I thought I heard bits of Gershwin and John Adams, but that’s just my life as a listener meeting the Kahanes’ lives as makers. The symphonic concerto can seem like a form that’s tapped out — really, are we doing this again? — and then along comes something like this. Yes. Yes we are.
Honourable mentions: Jason Moran x Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, Go To Your North (Yes). Yamandu Costa with Martin Sued and Orquesta Assintomática, Saga (Bagual). John Scofield and Dave Holland, Memories of Home (ECM). Cecile McLorin Salvant, Oh Snap (Nonesuch). Brad Mehldau, Ride Into The Sun (Nonesuch again; I’m not sure this great label has had a better year in the last 30). Lou-Adriane Cassidy, Triste Animal (Bravo).
The year so short, the music so immense. Make your own list. Listen to the things you hear.
Always enjoy reading your music articles, they make me discover new artists or remind me how much I love all this. I look forward to reading your words whenever I see the subject line!
Thanks for turning me on the Chris Thile! I've never heard Bach done this way and I absolutely love it!