God, I sucked at this blog last year. I knew I’d been running both out of stream and into creative walls for a while, but 2025 did an excellent job of showcasing all the ways I wasn’t following through on any unpaid pursuit that wasn’t stabbing a piece of fabric over and over and over again in cross-stitched catharsis.

But, even though my track record with sustained projects is admittedly terrible and usually results in an effort eventually dropped just as enthusiastically as it was begun, I don’t want this one to become another abandoned endeavor.

The past year was one of the worst ones ever for my music-listening habits, in terms of both volume and intensity. Last.fm showed me in no uncertain terms that 2025 yielded my lowest play count since 2017, a numerical nadir I attribute to (in no particular order) podcasts, an attention span absolutely wrecked by modern life, a seemingly bricked iPod, professional burnout, and finding that needle crafts done in silence is the most restorative creative escape for a precarious mental state further aggravated by a greater societal backslide into a world that brings the full weight of “May you live in interesting times” into starkly cursed reality.

It seemed vastly unfair that my worst listening year in ages coincided with both Spotify and Last.fm putting out the best annual wrap-ups I’ve ever enjoyed from either platform, especially with the latter debuting a beautiful Playback retrospective. Beyond that minor disappointment, though, most of what I want from Wrapped is a convenient playlist of the top 100 songs defining my year’s personal soundtrack, all neatly presented as an easy go-to option whenever I don’t know what I feel like listening to; the stats that I really care about are the far more comprehensive and quantifiable reports that Last.fm lovingly dispatches through the fog of National Hangover Day.

Which I guess is fortunate: It’s been so long since Wrapped was released and I was so removed from the main-character delusion driving the the impulses to screenshot and share my musical data at others that I have very little screenshot-for-posterity images to share from that wrap-up retrospective.

So I guess there’s a trio of things adding a little more detail and dimension to my 2025 in music, in ascending order of impact: It was the year I got better at silencing the invisible panel of Indier Than Thou judges I’ve apparently carried with me and catered to since this millennium was in its infancy, which is why I tried a lot of new-to-me music; my beloved iPod was corrupted beyond functionality until about mid-December because I couldn’t remember the password necessary for a hard reset, despite a fairly obvious message-in-a-bottle prompt from Past Me, which ground this project to a halt since that’s brilliantly where I kept all its playlists; and, on Dec. 1, I started a WFH job, which fundamentally improved my daily interactions with music. (More about that last one in the next post, a way-overdue lovefest celebrating Jens Lekman’s newest album.)

But enough bar charts. Here’s some other visuals showcasing the music I did love the hell out of throughout an otherwise pretty dismal year, courtesy of Last.fm’s Last.Year:

With 2025 fully in the rearview and 2026 off to a much more musically immersive start, I’m presently rebuilding my iPod’s library off of a probably psychotic parade of spreadsheets. I’m reconstructing the 12,700 Songs playlists, too, but that’s stalled out in the Bs over some errant tunes I’ve either got to track down on some errant drive or repurchase entirely. While I’m increasingly inclined to embrace sporadic deviations from the original intention of this blog, I would like to get back to the crux of it and resume alphabetical listening soon.

In the interest of full disclosure, part of why I let this project languish for so long is because the H song I’m trying to post about is one from an album and a band that hold a lot of significance to Late High School/Early College Me, and I’m realizing just how protective I am of that era of my identify—and also how reluctant I am to poke at memories that may have been a little too well-preserved in rose-colored amber. I think, of all the themes running through this blog both overtly and not, that unwillingness to confront formative parts of me is among the best chronicled; as I get deeper into my 40s, it’s only become more apparent that I really need to let a lot of that shit go already.

Recommitting myself to this blog falls under the greater goal of getting back to writing for myself, since I now have a job that’s more of a pure editor role and have to work a little harder at justifiably calling myself a writer. And, since the book I’ve been torturing into existence for roughly a decade is finally getting the effort it’s deserved for years, this all is part of doing my damnedest to stop being scared of Papa Bear’s salient advice to “write hard and clear about what hurts.”

So, to any of you who aren’t the bots diligently if not inexplicably boosting this website’s traffic through an otherwise wholly unimpressive 2025 (seriously, this site had record unique-visitor traffic last year), welcome back to 12,700 Songs. I don’t work in an office anymore, so there’s a real good chance that not having to pretend at social norms and niceties anymore will make me a little weirder with time.