This is the song I shared most this year

In search of smartdumb: is "folk is back" back?; new music versus good music; "is this good?" versus "do I like how I feel when I listen to this?"

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My job has been ‘make new music’ for over a decade now – the longest I’ve held onto any job in my adult life. The irony – I’m not sure it’s real irony, perhaps it’s more the ‘life’s funny that way’ Alanis Morissette kind – is that I don’t listen to nearly as much new music as I used to when I didn’t have this job.

In my 20s, I could plow through a couple thousand new albums in a year, with multiple listens courtesy long subway rides and long walks in between. I would also break up the year into quarters to study artist and label back catalogs or genres I didn’t know quite well: Montreal disco from January through March, Scandinavian folk from April to June, the beginnings of jungle, etc. I took notes on nearly everything I listened to, and wrote about a couple hundred releases each year as well.

In my current configuration, there are only so many hours in a day for music. I can spend my time making music, or practicing my instruments so I can get better at making music, or analyzing a single four-bar loop to understand why it doesn’t feel repetitive, or tapping in on the Hot 100 to glean what I can of a sweet spot between commercial tastes and my own, etc. Usually I am not making my music per se – just helping other people make the music they want to make. In any case, I am almost always listening with another purpose in mind. And that changes what you hear.

I’m probably listening to as much music-adjacent sound as I used to, but when I’m done working I have to rest my ears now. Our home is quiet, and so is our little pocket of Los Angeles. I sold my hifi when I moved here, and what’s left of my physical media collection resides in the hidden storage vaults of my son’s bedroom – a treasure for him to discover at some point, I tell myself… Breaking up the cobwebs, holding up my copy of Juan Maclean’s “Dance With Me” extended white label to the light…

The environments I listen to new music have also changed. For work, I listen on a pair of custom Augspurger monitors in a treated room with nearly even response from 20hz to 20,000hz. For pleasure, it’s usually my phone’s speaker. I listen when I’m cooking for my family, or exercising in my bedroom, or driving to the west side for a doctor’s appointment. For ear health reasons, I rarely listen on headphones anymore. New music therefore is rarely my totality. It always has a context.

I look forward to year-end lists, but also mourn that part of myself that could more credibly participate in the making of them. I mourn the part of myself that actively lobbied other writers to vote for my favorite albums so they would chart higher on our publication’s Best Of lists. I mourn the part of myself that believed the results somehow mattered – that the world would be an infinitesimally better place if more people listened to Deerhoof, or Annie, or Villalobos, or Madvillain, or –

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“Is this good?”

I could answer this question with so much conviction twenty years ago! Jet’s Get Born – an hour of kitschy rock & roll posturing, no formal innovation, no danger whatsoever – this was the definition of Not Good. QED.

But then I tried to record a tambourine and you know what, the tambourine on “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” sounds good. Then I work with many, many singers who cannot in any traditional way sing well and try my best to make it all work and try to find the right equipment to flatter their voice and try to massage the instrumental with them to get the balance right and you know what, the lead singer of Jet just has a great voice.

(Does he say “Yeah!!” a lot – like maybe 20 to 30 times per song? Yeah!! Is it better than Rob Zombie’s “Yeah!!”? No!!)

But maybe – maybe Jet are fine. Maybe their first record was totally fine. And maybe they are, in fact, very good at being Jet: a kitschy retro rock & roll revival band that can occasionally make you feel the way 70s classic rock can make you feel. Which, it turns out, is not quite as easy to do as I had previously thought it was!

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“Why do I feel how I feel?”

I remain exceptionally critical of other people’s music, but I’m certainly listening with more compassion. I’m not trying to construct the canon anymore, or destroy the corny parts of the old canon, or reconstruct a new one that corrects for the errors and omissions of the old canon, etc. When I listen to new music these days, I’m just trying to find stuff I like. I’m just listening to feel things I haven’t felt before.

Which I imagine is how most people who identify as music fans listen to music! Oh well. Definitely took the long way here.

Here’s where that gets tricky. The more I’ve learned, the more I can almost always find something interesting in almost any piece of music. This is a useful skill for overcoming my allergy to most hyped artists, particularly “New York’s next great rock band” style hype. I couldn’t click with Geese’s new album – too distracted by the conversation surrounding it – until I studied how simple and elongated Cameron Winter keeps his vocal melodies, and how well the broad motions contrast the frenetic playing of his bandmates. Dispassion can lead to passion. That was my way in.

At the same time, I can almost always find something I don’t like too, even when my initial gut reaction is “this sounds like something I like.” I can connect it to a broader trend, or I can connect it to some version of artist posturing, or ‘best practices’ / industry standards, or the sound of something that really, desperately wants to be “a hit” or to be “serious” or (the worst) “timeless.” The anonymizing, zero-friction high-pass of so much pop vocal production; clunky triad voicings that overarticulate the harmony; dull synthesizer programming with zero modulation; wayyyy too much shit happening as a cover-up for no clear musical line, on and on — I can always find some loose detail and anchor a whole story to it. My brain just spirals out and the fire-breathing 20-year-old inside me takes over: “Is this new, or is this merely pleasurable?”

At my worst, I think: If I’m enjoying this, it must not be good. Is Geese – who I like! – just the diatonic Radiohead? Are Los Thuthanaka – who I like! – just Black Dice with keytars and cowboy hats?

(63)

So yeah: It’s become hard for me to say something is ‘bad’ or ‘good’ these days. “What I listened to most” is meaningless. Octatrack tutorials on Youtube? Todd Barton’s Buchla 200 videos? My favorite music of 2025? I’m 43 years old, man. Do you think I’m going to listen to The Hellp when I can listen to Wayne Shorter?

Most interesting music of 2025?

Candidly? Is Addison Rae “interesting” because of how perfectly uninteresting she is? A smooth, frictionless vessel for other people’s music and emotions, leaving no trace of herself? A marvelous feat given her celebrity? She’ll be your whatever you want… Is she interesting because she is at the vanguard of major labels manufacturing consent for AI? Is this how major label artists finally get healthcare? By becoming the sales force?

Candidly? Is my favorite song of 2025 the AI ‘60s soul’ cover of Rob Zombie’s “Dragula” that was going around a few months ago on Instagram? The irony – or perhaps this too is mere Alanis – that AI can so deftly handle “soul” music, can so smoothly execute all the signifiers of rhythm & blues music, aka black music, and that the first record deals for AI artists are ones that peddle whitewashed r&b, soul, and gospel? Have we really bypassed tragedy and gone straight to farce here? But! But whoever it is singing, that voice…

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This is not even trolling. If you are or were a professional writer, your favorite song is the one that produces the best copy. Your enjoyment of the music has no small degree of relation to the thoughts you generated while you were engaging with the music and the complex of people and cultural context that created that music. And those thoughts – the act of thinking – maybe that is the pleasurable part of listening to, I dunno, Romy Mars. Maybe you don’t like how you feel when you listen to Romy Mars. But maybe you do like how you feel when you think about how you feel when you listen to Romy Mars. Get in! Let’s talk about it!

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In the absence of music I believe was “best” –

In the absence of music I believe was my “favorite” –

In the absence of music I swear to you was “interesting” –

This is the song I chose to share with other people. It’s a demo, at least in name, of a song called “If You Know Me” by the New York-based artist Hudson Freeman. I discovered this song like so many others do – on Instagram, via algorithm. In the video, the artist appears in front of a corn field on a peaceful country day. His guitar is hiked up high, and you can see the bottom three strings visibly vibrate when he strums them – perhaps because of some esoteric tuning, but either way it completes the hillbilly vibe. Freeman himself seems lifted out of a Sherwood Anderson short story – a twisted apple with a strawish mop of brown hair and an uneventful mustache. There are crickets and other sounds of the outdoors in the background – probably foley, as mythmaking is a given when the presentation is this blatantly ‘authentic.’ It’s a persona, no more or less than Kurt’s or Iggy’s. And the more I see Freeman in my feed, the more I admire his artistry in that way too.

And yet when I shared the song I provided no context, no pretext, no argument. I just sent the song. Granted: There’s the unconveniently convenient fact that this is a folk song, played by a human on an acoustic guitar with what appears to be little technological aid beyond that, against a yearlong backdrop of ethical and economic panic re: AI music. But was that why I’m sharing this? Hard to know.

Or maybe it was a more familiar sort of rebellion. Is “folk is back” back? New York’s logical response to indie sleaze pussy/dick/butthole type music, not unlike when “freakfolk” was the logical response to electroclash 20 years ago? Does every generation get the new weird America it deserves?

Whatever it is, I just love this song. There is a studio version, but I prefer this stripped back take. I love that it is just happy to be a demo – no more, no less. It is not trying to be “the best song.” It doesn’t seem to be trying to convince me of anything, really. It’s just something that somebody made, something that they thought was worth sharing with us, and something I thought was worth sharing with you. Guzzle up!