The first ten-year anniversary I remember caring about was Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity, in 2009. The album came out when I was seven, but by the time I was seventeen, it had attained legendary status to a burgeoning emo obsessive. I remember playing the CD on the bus, my disappointment when I couldn’t go to Chicago for the anniversary tour, and my jealousy when a friend texted me from the show.

Anniversary tours have become kind of passé since then, often feeling less like a celebration than an easy cash-in (not that I begrudge anyone who can make a buck playing music), but I still tend to have a good time with them. This year, though, the anniversaries felt different. It’s not my teenage years I’m looking back on now, but times when I was already fully an adult, working and living in Chicago. That made the memories of No Closer To Heaven and Tell Me I’m Alright and The Force Awakens feel both closer and further away somehow.

These anniversaries also all came amid a very full 2025.

Lily was born in February, so Liesi and I spent the early part of the year navigating having two kids under two and everything else that comes with a new baby. I was very worried about being overwhelmed, but between Lily definitely being the easier of our two babies and having done it all once before, it ended being less challenging and more fun than I could have hoped. (Until we all got sick the week before Christmas — that was very challenging and not fun).

I also kept busy with creative projects, even though the list below isn’t long. Matt and I have been doing Noise Floor for well over a year now, and recording is still something I look forward to every week. All of my bands were writing and working on other cool ideas too, so lots more to come on both the music and podcast fronts in 2026.

Stuff I Made This Year

• Noise Floor – A weekly music discussion podcast I co-host with Matt Kistler
• “Richardson” Richardson – The Wizard’s Riff (mixing, mastering)

Music

My year on Last.fm
I really do try to listen widely, but if you’ve followed these lists for a few (or, oh god, 17) years, there are a lot of familiar names at the top. Among the 130-ish new albums I checked out this year, I was most drawn to the new entries in the careers of artists I’ve long loved. This isn’t just falling back on old favorites, I don’t think — many of these artists have released duds over the years and found their way back by making something fresh and vital. I’m especially interested in how these artists that I’ve grown up with confront aging in their music. I rang in my 34th year with a Motion City Soundtrack song that wrestles with “[putting] on the nostalgia crown” and the lingering feeling that your best days are behind you. Happy birthday, right?

But nearly every album I loved this year has something to do with growing older. La Dispute decamped to Australia to explore the rediscover the sonic and poetic intensity of their early albums, the band playing like their younger selves while Jordan Dreyer’s lyrics question how much control we actually have over our lives. Yellowcard wrote about the joy and anxiety of becoming a parent, while Suzzallo worked through the unfathomable grief of losing a child. There are reunions, like the first Spitalfield and Moving Mountains music in over a decade and the Crutchfield sisters teaming up again in Snocaps, and there are solo efforts released in novel formats: Hayley Williams’s Ego Death At a Bachelorette Party showed up online one summer day, free of expectations, with no tracklist, on a Windows 98-style website. It was both a weaponization and confrontation of nostalgia, and the songs are so good.

I did discover some new bands I loved this year. Beauty School pulled me in with a Dan Campbell feature, and I spun that album a ton. G Flip’s “I Don’t Wanna Regret It” had me rolling down the minivan windows for months. The Armed hollowed out my skull with some of the most exciting, chaotic music I’ve heard in a long time.

I found so much to love in music this year. I’ll go into more detail on the next episode of Noise Floor, but for now, here are the lists. Give something a spin.

My Favorite Albums of 2025

1. La Dispute – No One Was Driving the Car
2. Suzzallo – The Quiet Year
3. Motion City Soundtrack – The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World
4. Hayley Williams – Ego Death At a Bachelorette Party
5. Moving Mountains – Pruning of the Lower Limbs
6. Coheed and Cambria – Vaxis III: The Father of Make Believe
7. Hot Mulligan – The Sound a Body Makes When It’s Still
8. The Mountain Goats – Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan
9. Yellowcard – Better Days
10. Beauty School – From Now On
11. Snocaps – Snocaps
12. The Armed – The Future Is Here and Everything Needs To Be Destroyed
13. All Get Out – Side A
14. G Flip – Dream Ride
15. Pool Kids – Easier Said Than Done
16. Lambrini Girls – Who Let the Dogs Out
17. Jason Isbell – Foxes In the Snow
18. Elway – Nobody’s Going To Heaven
19. Lorde – Virgin
20. The World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid To Die – Dreams of Being Dust
21. Laura Stevenson – Late Great
22. Empty Heaven – Swear
23. Bon Iver – SABLE, fABLE
24. Winona Fighter – My Apologies To the Chef
25. Weakened Friends – Feels Like Hell

My Favorite EPs of 2025

1. Spanish Love Songs – A Brief Intermission In the Flattening of Time
2. The Wonder Years – Burst and Decay (Volume III)
3. Spitalfield – Play + Record
4. The Paradox – NSFW
5. Harrison Gordon – Spring Break

Live Shows

My Big Show Spreadsheet
I attended or played 24 shows this year. I’m cheating a bit on this list, admittedly, because I had too many great experiences to pick just five sets. I got to see the Wonder Years twice, send Foxing off (for now), and scream “Brutal” with a zillion teenagers, among so much more. This year’s Riot Fest was my favorite yet, whether I was seeing Rilo Kiley and Texas Is the Reason for the first time, coming out of mosh retirement for Knuckle Puck, or just hanging with all the friends I’ve made through shows over the years.

And then there’s Adjy.

I had been trying to see Adjy since before the pandemic, but the timing of their tours never worked out until this summer. I ventured out well past my bedtime to see them in the tiny back room of Cole’s Bar, on a stage that could barely contain their six members and at least as many keyboards and mallet percussion instruments. It was transcendent. There are so few bands in the world that transport me the way Adjy does, taking me back to all the places I’ve fallen in love with music since I was a kid, from the Coffeehouse to the dusty fields of Cornerstone Festival to the massive arenas that Adjy deserves to headline (and even those couldn’t hold the grandeur of The Idyll Opus). Maybe I’m overselling this band, but maybe not. When I saw them a second time in October, it was with a bunch of friends who can all now vouch that they are actually that good.

1. Adjy at Cole’s (and also at Reggie’s with Future Teens)
2. Riot Fest: Rilo Kiley, Texas Is the Reason, The Wonder Years, Knuckle Puck, and more
3. The Wonder Years (Burst and Decay Tour) at Thalia Hall
4. Lollapalooza: Bleachers, Olivia Rodrigo, Orla Gartland, and more
5. Foxing and Pool Kids at Thalia Hall

Movies

My year on Letterboxd
I saw, as of this writing, 26 new releases this year. The usual caveats: Too much comes out at the end of the year to keep up, and I’ll try to see all the big stuff by the Oscars. But will anything top Sinners and Weapons for me? Seems unlikely. Worth noting that I saw three of my top five in theaters, something I want to get back in the habit of doing as the kids get older.

1. Sinners
2. Weapons
3. Eddington
4. Wake Up Dead Man
5. Black Bag
6. 28 Years Later
7. One Battle After Another
8. No Other Choice
9. Bugonia
10. Thunderbolts*

TV

I stopped paying for Trakt VIP when they doubled their prices, so I don’t get the fancy recap page, but that won’t stop me from making a list. I once again tried to keep my TV intake to returning favorites and only start new shows that seem particularly interesting or critically lauded (both true of Pluribus and Adolescence). Season 2 of Andor was a runaway favorite for so many reasons, but primarily because it’s proof that there are still relevant stories to tell in my favorite sci-fi and fantasy worlds.

1. Andor (Season 2)
2. Pluribus (Season 1)
3. Adolescence (Season 1)
4. The Bear (Season 4)
5. Slow Horses (Season 5)

Podcasts

My year on Overcast
Blank Check dominant, no surprise there. It’s still my favorite podcast after three years of listening.

I really do listen to every episode of my own podcast — if I start getting bored of it then I assume everyone else will too.

Also, I’ll shout out my favorite new podcast of the year, In the Key of Brie, a delightful and insightful interview show that has introduced me to a ton of great music.

Books

My year on Goodreads
I read 31 books this year, a lot of which was catching up on Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere. In a surprising turn, my two favorite reads of 2025 were new releases.

Mark Z. Danielewski has been my favorite author since I read House of Leaves at the tail end of high school. Tom’s Crossing has very little in the way of the ergodic structure or crazy formatting that Danielewski is known for, but it’s still some of his best writing, with an immersive setting and a deep sense of care about the nature of stories and who gets to tell them.

If you care about music at all, Mood Machine is essential reading. Liz Pelly’s book is not only a great explanation of how (and why) the way we consume music today is broken. It will make you want to do something about it.

1. Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski
2. Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly
3. Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson
4. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
5. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Next Year

I want to:

• Release new music with all of my bands
• Attend my 1000th show (only 25 to go)
• Grow Noise Floor and guest on more podcasts
• Run a half marathon

2015 Revisited

I was scrolling back through the archives recently and realized that I never actually made a list in 2015. I cited some albums I liked, but I hedged a whole bunch in the blurb about not being a critic and didn’t even rank them. Must have been having a weird winter. So as a decade-late update, here are my 15 favorite albums of 2015 (with the benefit of hindsight).

1. The Wonder Years – No Closer To Heaven
2. Desaparecidos – Payola
3. mewithoutYou – Pale Horses
4. The Mountain Goats – Beat the Champ
5. The Sidekicks – Runners In the Nerved World
6. Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly
7. Jason Isbell – Something More Than Free
8. Jeff Rosenstock – We Cool?
9. Death Cab For Cutie – Kintsugi
10. David Bowie – Blackstar
11. Hop Along – Painted Shut
12. Julien Baker – Sprained Ankle
13. Sufjan Stevens – Carrie and Lowell
14. Dawes – All Your Favorite Bands
15. Knuckle Puck – Copacetic

Don’t let them make you go numb

Don’t let them dull your compassion

Don’t let them tell you you’re wrong

Don’t let them claim this is balance, no

Don’t let them question your love
-The Armed

A few days ago, Liesi and I took Elliot to the park by our house to enjoy the year’s last offering of nice weather. 50 degrees at the golden hour in final throes of December — maybe it’s climate change, or just Illinois being Illinois, but you have to take advantage of those days when you get them. It felt like a lot of days this past fall, the best October weather we’ve had in years. Elliot was laughing like a madman while I rolled a soccer ball down a slide at him, and the year kind of snapped into place.

It was a full year, to say the least. Elliot is 18 months old now, and getting out of the newborn/infant stage and into full-on toddler mode has made parenting genuinely fun for me. Exhausting at times, sure, but seeing his personality grow and develop fills me with joy every day. We’re expecting our second in February, so the back half of the year has been a whirlwind of nerves and excitement and preparation to be a family of four.

This year also marked a decade of being what I’d call a real adult. 2014 was the year I released my first album, started dating Liesi, graduated college, went on my first tour, moved to Chicago, started my career, saw Jimmy Eat World play “23” on my 23rd birthday. I ticked off all of those “ten years ago” milestones with mixed feelings. Fondness for that year and all the growth it started, of course, but tinged with the regret that I didn’t take every chance or go through every door that was open to me then. I worry that I haven’t done enough, that, despite all the good in my life, I haven’t accomplished everything my 23-year old self had hoped I would. (Unsurprisingly, my favorite album of the year has something to say about that, but more on that below).

I think that’s a normal feeling at this age, especially for parents. There’s a sense of so many doors closing as you rearrange your life and priorities around your new tiny human. There’s less time for all the things I’d like to make and see and do, the things that, a decade ago, formed the basis of who I am and how I see myself. I feel more acutely than ever that I’m rebuilding and reshaping myself every day. I struggle with the balance sometimes, but I know what I want: I want to be the best father and husband and friend that I can be, and I want to stay curious and hungry and creative. I hope that I can.

And on to the lists. I always rank these (except for the one year when I didn’t), but everything on here comes highly recommended by me. Watch something, read something, listen to something.

Stuff I Made This Year

• Noise Floor – A music podcast I host with Matt Kistler
• This Page Intentionally Left Blank – Rebuilding Year (everything but drums)
• Pelafina – “Twist the Knife” (guitar, keyboard, screams, recording, mixing, mastering)
• Plutocracy Planet – Plutocracy Planet (bass on tracks 8 and 11)

Music

My Year On Last.fm
Though it’s not the case every year, this list mostly lines up with my most played albums of the year. That’s probably how it should be. These were the albums I came back to over and over again, not what I heard once or twice and felt like “should” be on a top ten list. When I read back through my past lists, the “I guess this should be here” picks always stand out as some kind of posturing to be “cool” or “right” when I am rarely either.

If you know me at all, my top two albums probably aren’t a surprise. In Lieu of Flowers is the third album Wonder Years frontman Dan Campbell has made under the Aaron West moniker, and it’s easily the best. I’m not sure there’s a more cathartic moment to be found on this list than the bridge of “Monongahela Park.” I hope it’s not the last we hear from Aaron, but if it is, In Lieu of Flowers leaves the character in a satisfying place.

Maxwell Stern has become one of my favorite songwriters over the past five years, both as a solo artist and in Signals Midwest. His second solo album, In the Good Light, is a lush, engrossing collection of songs about falling in love and making peace with your past. There’s a thread of community and connection that runs through it, and every line about a friend or a loved one conjures up the face of someone in my own life that I should definitely call up and check in on. I could make a case for a few different best tracks, but “You Deserve a Great Love” is particularly noteworthy. It’s a resonant rocker with a bridge that recalls Elvis Costello, and I played it constantly in the second half of the year as a mantra, a hug, a reminder not to be so hard on myself.

1. Maxwell Stern – In the Good Light
2. Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties – In Lieu of Flowers
3. Macseal – Permanent Repeat
4. Knocked Loose – You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To
5. Origami Angel – Feeling Not Found
6. Bleachers – Bleachers
7. Los Campesinos! – All Hell
8. Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood
9. The Forecast – Good Journey
10. Charly Bliss – Forever
11. Foxing – Foxing
12. Touche Amore – Spiral In a Straight Line
13. Friko – Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here
14. State Faults – Children of the Moon
15. Empty Heaven – Laughing

Honorable Mention/The Only EP I Really Loved This Year: Anika Pyle – Four Corners

Live Shows

My comprehensive spreadsheet of every show I’ve been to.
I played or attended 30 shows this year. When venues opened up again after the Covid shutdowns, I made an effort to focus on seeing bands I hadn’t seen before or might never get a chance to see again. This year I swung back in the opposite direction, and all of my favorite shows were artists I’ve seen many times before. It’s just more fun to scream songs you love than fill out a checklist.

1. The Get Up Kids – 10/11 at Metro
2. Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties, Future Teens, Maura Weaver – 6/23 at Bottom Lounge
3. Spanish Love Songs – 4/18 at Metro
4. Guster – 8/1 at Red Rocks Amphitheater
5. The Blood Brothers – 12/20 at Thalia Hall While it feels wrong to put a show I played on this list, Pelafina’s set at Taste of Randolph/PIQNIQ was too much fun to not mention here.

Movies

My year on Letterboxd
As with every year, caveat that I haven’t seen a bunch of big November and December releases yet. I’ll probably update this closer to the Oscars when I’ve hopefully seen all of the major contenders, but this is the list for now. Overall, I think this was a really good movie year, and Dune: Part 2 on opening day with the Hans Zimmer score literally shaking my seat was a top tier moviegoing experience.

1. Dune: Part 2
2. Anora
3. Challengers
4. Sing Sing
5. Rebel Ridge
6. Nosferatu
7. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
8. The Substance
9. I Saw the TV Glow
10. Hit Man

TV

My year on Trakt
I went into this year with the plan of not starting new TV shows. As the streaming model has pushed so much TV into longer episodes and shorter seasons, I think a lot of the magic of TV has faded. Focusing on the shows I’m already excited about seemed like a better use of TV time than adding a whole bunch of new shows just to keep up. Of course, I made a couple exceptions. I did watch the long awaited (though ultimately middling) Netflix adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, the consensus critical favorite Shōgun, and obviously the Star Wars shows. In lieu of keeping up with new TV, I watched all of Twin Peaks — a beautiful and at times frustrating journey — and went way back to the beginning of The Twilight Zone, which continues to surprise and delight as I meander through the classic seasons.

1. The Bear (Season 3)
2. Slow Horses (Season 4)
3. What We Do In the Shadows (Season 6)
4. Shōgun (Season 1)
5. Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (Season 1)

Books

My year on Goodreads
I read 35 books this year (including a handful of short stories/novellas that I logged individually). That’s a bit higher than my number on Goodreads, which is missing a few things I counted, like Dan Campbell’s new poetry chapbook and the extensive hardbound liner notes to Adjy’s The Idyll Opus (I-VI). No list of 2024 releases, as usual — it would only have two books on it — but these were my favorite reads of the year.

1. The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson
2. The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson
3. Lincoln In the Bardo by George Saunders
4. The Conference of the Birds by Farid Ud-Din Attar
5. Inciting Joy by Ross Gay

Finally, my favorite lyric of the year, from “In the Good Light” by Maxwell Stern.
God damn, don’t let me do that dance of
“I wonder what I could have been?”
Like I’ll never hit the halcyon heights of joy that I knew back then
A heart filled up with motion, baby
I am leaning in to a brilliant beacon in the distance
Praying: “If there’s a moment, don’t you miss it. Amen.”

Introduction

“Some days there’s just so much to marvel at, and some days you’re at the bottom of a pit.”

This was a year that fit that Spanish Love Songs lyric a little too well, a year where I felt the highs and the lows more acutely than ever. There were the panic attacks and the days I felt like I couldn’t get out of bed, the satisfaction of finally releasing a new album and the thrill of playing it live to a packed Gman Tavern, the whirlwind of Elliot’s birth and figuring out the basics of being a parent, the utter exhaustion of those first few months, and the unquantifiable joy of his first smiles.

It’s been a lot, but I am so lucky and I don’t want to lose sight of that.

Stuff I Made This Year

• Pelafina – “Milestone” – Guitar, recording, mixing, mastering
• Watch No Evil – “Green Room – Punk-Cost Fallacy” – Podcast guest appearance
• Jeff Schaller and the Long Way Home – For Keeps and a Single Day – Guitar, keyboard, percussion, recording, mixing

Music

My year on Last.fm. It’s been really cool to follow Spanish Love Songs over the past six years as they’ve shed the trappings of pop punk a little bit more on each album. This is the third time they’ve topped my year end list, and I think No Joy is their best work yet.

As usual, the ranking of the rest of the list is just what I’m feeling today. I recommend all of these, from the relative newcomers (Awakebutstillinbed, OrigamI Angel) to reunited old favorites. For a long time, I didn’t think we’d ever get new music from The Gaslight Anthem, Fall Out Boy, or Yellowcard, three bands that fundamentally shaped my tastes as a teenager. All three are back, seemingly more excited than ever.

On the EP side, John K. Samson released new music under name Vivat Virtute, so no one else really had a chance at my number one spot there. Even if there’s never a Weakerthans reunion, I hope he continues making these perfect little snapshots of local politics and cats forever.

I also made a Spotify playlist with my favorite songs from each of these releases, plus a handful of other singles.

Albums

1. Spanish Love Songs – No Joy
2. The Gaslight Anthem – History Books
3. The Menzingers – Some of It Was True
4. Olivia Rodrigo – Guts
5. Fall Out Boy – So Much (For) Stardust
6. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – Weathervanes
7. Awakebutstillinbed – Chaos Takes the Wheel and I Am a Passenger
8. The National – First Two Pages of Frankenstein
9. Hot Mulligan – Why Would I Watch
10. Foo Fighters – But Here We Are
11. Blink-182 – One More Time…
12. Fireworks – Higher Lonely Power
13. Ruston Kelly – The Weakness
14. The Mountain Goats – Jenny From Thebes
15. Origami Angel – The Brightest Days
16. Dave Hause – Drive It Like It’s Stolen
17. Citizen – Calling the Dogs
18. Paramore – This Is Why
19. There Will Be Fireworks – Summer Moon
20. The Maine – The Maine

EPs

1. Vivat Virtute – June First
2. Yellowcard – Childhood Eyes
3. Adjy – June Songs, Vol 1
4. Boygenius – The Rest
5. The Flips – A Drug To the Dour

Live Shows

I played or attended 26 shows this year. My days of getting to 80 or more are probably behind me, but I can live with that if the shows I do see are as special as these. Liesi and I saw The Wonder Years together in March and got to hear most of our favorite songs from The Hum Goes On Forever, a record largely about becoming a parent that has, unsurprisingly, meant a lot to us this year. Then I saw them again in October playing all of The Greatest Generation. I lost my voice screaming along to “I Just Want To Sell Out My Funeral” with old friends and new.

1. The Wonder Years – 10/8 at Riviera
2. Bleachers – 12/7 at Aragon Ballroom
3. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band – 8/9 at Wrigley Field
4. The Wonder Years – 3/16 at Concord Music Hall
5. City Mouth – 11/22 at Beat Kitchen

Movies

My year on Letterboxd. I’ve seen 42 movies from this year. I didn’t get to the theater much, especially after Elliot was born, so I missed out on the full Barbenheimer experience. There’s a lot I still want to see, but I think this was a really solid year for movies.

1. Killers of the Flower Moon
2. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
3. Past Lives
4. Oppenheimer
5. Barbie
6. May December
7. The Killer
8. Infinity Pool
9. Asteroid City
10. Beau Is Afraid

TV

My year on Trakt. This was feeling like a bit of a slow TV year until November, when there was a deluge of new shows and new seasons. Some of these are still ongoing as of this writing, but I’ve seen enough to feel like I can rank them, and certainly enough to recommend them. Same caveat as with movies: There’s a bunch of stuff I haven’t seen yet (namely the Doctor Who specials) that could easily make this list if I re-do it in a few months.

1. The Bear (Season 2)
2. The Last of Us (Season 1)
3. Poker Face (Season 1)
4. Slow Horses (Season 3)
5. Succession (Season 4)
6. For All Mankind (Season 4)
7. Fargo (Season 5)
8. Mrs. Davis (Season 1)
9. Ted Lasso (Season 3)
10. Barry (Season 4)

Books

My year on Goodreads. I read 27 books this year (only one actually released in 2023), and these were my favorites. Pale Fire was a recommendation from a friend, and aside from being a masterwork of language, it was neat to read as an influence on House of Leaves (and to find all the lyrics The Menzingers have lifted from it).

1. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
2. The Passenger / Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy
3. The Chosen by Chaim Potok
4. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
5. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

What does it mean to grow when the world around you is falling apart? I think that’s the central question of Dent, the fifth album from Signals Midwest and my most-played album of the year by a wide margin. It’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot over the past couple years, years that have been largely soundtracked by the last two Signals Midwest releases (Dent and their 2019 EP Pin) and vocalist Maxwell Stern’s 2020 masterpiece, Impossible Sum. To me, at least, Dent is an album about processing all the distance and unrest and darkness of the pandemic years and starting come out on the other side with a sense of clear-eyed optimism.

This year didn’t start with a lot of optimism. The first few months were spent in the throes of the biggest Covid wave yet, and capped by getting Covid myself in March and missing a tour I had planned to go on and yet another chance to see Converge. Thankfully, things were mostly up from there. Liesi and I went on a couple of wonderful vacations, to New York and Europe. I played shows with Pelafina, The Long Way Home, Better Love, and Thomas Nicholas, and I went to tons more. I caught another Yankees game (although not in New York).

For me, the most striking moments of Dent are when joy bursts through the darkness. Sometimes that’s right in the lyrics, on “Gold In the Grey” or in the bridge of “It Left a Dent” (my favorite track on the album):

So if there is a light, turn towards it
I want to get a better look at you
I’ve been digging through a dead year’s worth of darkness just to find it
Finding all the good inside it

And sometimes it’s in the harmonized guitar leads in “Tommy Took a Picture” or the layered backing vocals of “All Good Things.” And sometimes it’s just in the memory of screaming the ending of “Love and Commerce” at Subterranean over the summer.

The pandemic is still going, there were political setbacks that I don’t need to recount, and I spent far too much time thinking about a dumb billionaire, but this was a year of trying to find those moments of joy in my own life, even though I know they always exist against background of world that isn’t doing great. That’s the essence of Dent for me. I’m so glad it was the soundtrack to this year.

Looking forward to 2023, there’s a new Long Way Home album coming (I promise for real this time, he says for the third year running). I spent most of my creative time and effort this year recording and mixing it, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.

And, of course, some very exciting personal news.

Stuff I Made This Year

• Pelafina – “Your Ripped Jeans” – Guitar, recording, mixing, mastering
• Set List – “Episode 6: Troy Sennett” – Podcast appearance
• City Mouth – Locomotion Sessions – Guitar
• Watch No Evil – “Red Dead Revenge-tion” (background music) – Guitar, recording

Music – Albums

I got back into using Last.fm this year. Unfortunately I couldn’t get all my old data back, but here are my stats from 2022. I’m less attached to the ranking of this list than I have been in the past. After the top four, the rest of these could be in pretty much any order, and I think they’re all really great.

1. Signals Midwest – Dent
2. The Wonder Years – The Hum Goes On Forever
3. Gang of Youths – Angel In Realtime
4. Arm’s Length – Never Before Seen, Never Again Found
5. The 1975 – Being Funny In a Foreign Language
6. Death Cab For Cutie – Asphalt Meadows
7. Coheed and Cambria – Vaxis II: A Window of the Waking Mind
8. The Tisburys – Exile On Main Street
9. Timeshares – Limb
10. Spoon – Lucifer On the Sofa
11. Pool Kids – Pool Kids
12. Caracara – New Preoccupations
13. Gregor Barnett – Don’t Go Throwing Roses In My Grave
14. Mt. Oriander – Then the Lightness Leaves and I Become Heavy Again
15. Dan Andriano and the Bygones – Dear Darkness
16. The Mountain Goats – Bleed Out
17. Pale Waves – Unwanted
18. LS Dunes – Past Lives
19. Future Teens – Self Help
20. Craig Finn – A Legacy of Rentals

Music – EPs

1. Rise Against – Nowhere Generation II
2. Bright Eyes – Companion EPs
3. Better Love – I Wasn’t Ready Then, But I Think I Am Now
4. Bottom Bracket – A Figure In Armor
5. Tigers Jaw – Old Clothes

Live Shows

I went to or played 41 shows this year. These were my favorites, sometimes for the setlist or the sound, sometimes for the people I went with, but always for the joy I still find in a room or a field full of music.

1. The Wonder Years – 3/5 at Concord Music Hall (The Upsides / Suburbia Tour)
2. Signals Midwest – 7/21 at Subterranean
3. The 1975 – 12/9 at Aragon Ballroom
4. My Chemical Romance / Bleachers / The Wonder Years – 9/16 at Riot Fest
5. The Get Up Kids – 9/17 at Riot Fest

Movies

According to my Letterboxd, I watched 61 movies released this year, and there are still a handful I want to see, so I might stealthily edit this part over the next couple weeks.

1. The Fabelmans
2. Everything Everywhere All At Once
3. Glass Onion
4. Nope
5. The Banshees of Inisherin
6. Top Gun: Maverick
7. Avatar: The Way of Water
8. The Menu
9. Barbarian
10. Prey

TV

My Trakt Year In Review. This was such a good TV year that, maybe for the first time, this top ten list was the hardest one to make.

1. Station Eleven
2. The Bear (Season 1)
3. We Own This City
4. Andor (Season 1)
5. Severance (Season 1)
6. Atlanta (Seasons 3 and 4)
7. For All Mankind (Season 3)
8. Slow Horses (Seasons 1 and 2)
9. Better Call Saul (Season 6)
10. House of the Dragon (Season 1)

Books

I read 35 books this year, and these were my favorites. As usual, I only read a couple 2022 releases, so this includes anything I read for the first time in the past year.

1. Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
2. Devil House by John Darnielle
3. All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
4. Sellout by Dan Ozzi
5. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

That’s all for now. See you next year.

“Make me a blind contour drawing of the future, capturing the form in all its grace, flaws, ritual, and promise.”