Favorite Recordings of 2025: #15–#11
Here are my reflections on five of my fifteen favorite recordings of 2025, featuring (in alphabetical order) Ólafur Arnalds (with Talos), Patty Griffin, Anna B Savage, Mavis Staples, and Wet Leg.
If you missed the first two playlists of my annual celebration, here they are, available for all readers:
And now, the next five!
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#15
Ólafur Arnalds & Talos, A Dawning
One way to ruin for yourself an experience of The Dawning would be to scan the reviews that come up in a quick Google search. At first, I laughed at some of the flamboyantly hyperbolic flailing I found, the preposterously purple verbiage describing this as some kind of historic fusion of music and philosophy. We are a world starving for need of beauty and hope, and when some of us find something good, something graceful, something poetic, we kind of freak out.
Far be it from me, though, to scowl when the starving find a meaningful meal. I cannot deny that this recording — sung with such sincerity and tenderness by Talos in his final hours, his voice buoyed up on soaring swells of Ólafur Arnalds’ orchestration (which was recorded only ten days after Talos passed) — invites us to sail along dark rivers of meaningful lament, occasioning glimpses of hope and transcendence. Sometimes the lyrics are cryptic to the point of opacity, but they never sound anything less than profoundly personal.
And, on mornings when it is difficult to face another day of harrowing headlines about wars waged by the heartless to exploit the vulnerable; about the murder of democracy by conspiracies of sex criminals and fascists and fools; about concentration camps being built to imprison the innocent . . . well, I listen, and I am moved.
Under a broken moon we regaled what was
I watched the swallows bloom into a cloud of dust
Oh brother come be my keeper, hold me dear
Don't let the wreckage call what the wreckage wants
Now let’s just ride on highs while the moment is right
No, don't you fold my wings for the fear of flight...
...
Don't let that light outrun us yet
It feels like this war is our dawning...
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