As evidenced by the last blog, I play a lot of video games. I played 60+ games this year, and I want to compare that with other popular forms of media to show how one-sided I am. In 2025, I ended up watching 8 movies (two of them only because I was on a plane), 5 TV shows (3 of which I didn't finish), and 4 books (2 of which I'm slowly working through and 1 I dropped). So I kinda only play video games.
The exception to this is music, which is a thing I consciously started caring more about because being a guy who only likes video games is embarrassing. In 2024, I started listening to more music, going to live shows, and even playing myself. I've continued all of that into 2025, and kinda wanna do a (not generated by a streaming service) wrap up for all of it.
A Mixtape
For the past two years, a group of my friends have been making mixtapes for each other at the end of the year. The "rules" are that it should be 10 songs that you really liked and listened to a lot that year, and to avoid repeat artists. I narrowed it down to ~14 songs and realized I could do a kinda corny concept album vibe, so I made it so it follows a relationship that falls apart into destructive behaviors that come after. I don't really know if it's a good listen while reading the rest of this since it ramps up in intensity as it goes on, but you can listen to it here.
Listening to Music
This year I made it a goal to listen to three new albums a week[1]. In 2024, I found it pretty nice to listen to more stuff, so I dialed up by 3x for 2025. I'll just rapid fire some thoughts about the experience:
- First off, here's the full list, if you're curious. Anything marked with a * is something that I particularly liked a lot.
- This ended up being way harder than I thought it would be. I know there is an infinite amount of music to listen to, but oftentimes I would exhaust my list of albums I had queued up and then I would scramble to find something to listen to by browsing Rate Your Music or looking at a Fantano review. Keeping up the pace was weirdly a bit stressful, as well, since sometimes I just wanted to listen to something I already knew but I was "behind schedule."
- I realized how out of touch I am with what is the normal music listening experience people have now. I didn't realize how many people just turn on their Spotify algorithm and just hit favorite on songs they like as they come up, and then maybe shuffle the liked song playlist sometimes. I don't think I have anything novel to say about how evil streaming service algorithms are or anything, but it is a good reminder to me of how pervasive they are in our cultural habits.
- That said I love albums as their own form of art. Over the year I had to explain to a few people that I found value in the composition of an album, the length, the flow, and that's why I focused my listening in that way. I've always preferred listening to albums (though I'll eventually send my most liked songs of an album to a favorites playlist that I'll listen to occasionally), but now I just have a better sense of what I value in album composition.
- Asking people for album recommendations is a nice way to talk to someone, a lot of people loved the opportunity to let me know their favorites. 42 out of 158 albums I listened to this year were direct recommendations from people I know.
- The main takeaway is that I don't think I'll do this again. I'm not someone who listens to music passively whenever I'm doing something (if I do this, I completely drone it out), so I usually listen to music when I'm doing specific things like during certain tasks I have at work or occasionally while I'm driving. In order to listen to enough music to meet the quota, I would often listen to an album just once over while not giving it a ton of attention. I go back and relisten a few times if something catches my ear, but there's a lot of stuff on my list that at this point I can't remember anything about. I think going forward I am going to try to have a more focused and intentional approach to a smaller amount of music.[2]
Live Shows
In another follow up from 2024, I went to see a bunch of live shows this year. In the past, live music never appealed to me, but nowadays I get so much energy from seeing things live that I feel like I can barely keep it together after. Here are the shows I went to:
- Japanese Breakfast: I'm a huge Japanese Breakfast fan and I really loved their new album (according to Apple Music it was my most listened to album this year), so I coughed up insane Ticketmaster fees to see them at The Salt Shed. The opener was Shinbangumi, who I've never been a huge fan of, but his show was weird and fun and had little skits. Japanese Breakfast was obviously great for me to see as a big fan, all around a good experience but nothing transcendent or anything.
- Run the Jewels and Wu-Tang Clan: I love RTJ but I've only listened to Enter the Wu-Tang, so this show was kinda weird. RTJ played for maybe 40 minutes max, and then Wu-Tang was over 2 hours. Great for the Wu-Tang die-hards who seemed to be having a great time, less so for me. This was at the United Center and I paid too much money for floor seats, mostly as a "well I should try it at least once" kinda experience. I really like smaller GA shows more than seated stuff, but I wanted confirmation that I liked it more than the best kind of seats at the biggest kind of arena show. I got the confirmation. More $30 shows for me, please.
- Haru Nemuri: Haru is my queen, enough that I decided to go to her see her again even though I saw her last year too. She has endless energy during shows, she works the crowd really well, she drapes herself in a Palestinian Keffiyeh as she performs and shouts in protest against capitalism and fascism. My queen. The only unfortunate thing about her show is that in America, she just plays off backing tracks. Apparently in Japan, she has a proper band behind her, and I would pay a lot of money to see her like that.[3]
- Mei: This maybe shouldn't count, but on a random night of my Japan trip, my friends and I decided to go walk around Shinjuku to just experience the area. We found a random plaza where I guess they schedule musicians to play sets for people to enjoy. We didn't stay long, but of the three musicians that were playing, we watched Mei for a little while and she was really enchanting. Across the whole trip, this moment really stood out as a kind of really nice but completely unplanned moment, and Mei's performance was a big part of a night I will be remembering fondly for a long time. Unfortunately, her studio recordings are not nearly as nice as her live acoustic performances, but I guess that also just makes that night more special.
- Hyperion #3 @ Shimokitazawa: Before the Japan trip, me and my friends were planning things we would be doing and the only thing I asked specifically to do was to go see a live show in Shimokitazawa. As someone that listens to so much Japanese rock music, this felt like an important pilgrimage to make. I found an Instagram account that helps foreigners see and attend upcoming shows, and found a show that worked in our schedule, and when I checked them out, the bands sounded nice. The venue itself was a small concrete basement with no stage, but that made it feel very intimate. The singers were maybe 8 feet in front of me. Four bands played (pandagolff, iVy, SAGOSAID, and Hoach5000), all of whom I had never heard of before but was a good mix of styles. You could tell the first two bands were younger and less experienced but it was cute, they kept thanking "Sago-san" and "Hoach-san", and the later bands talked about "panda-chan" and "iVy-chan." Definitely a huge highlight of the trip to Japan.
- The Weekend Run Club: One of my high school friends has been the frontman for a local band for a few years now, but I had never been to an actual show before. It was a bit surreal seeing him perform live and work the crowd so well, but in truth he's right in his element. The venue was pretty small and maybe only 30 people in the crowd, which was a fun vibe during the show and after. I had the most midwestener-ass conversation with the drummer's parents about sports and other nonsense. Good times.
Playing Music
I was not very diligent about being consistent with my attempts to learn piano this year. I was taking lessons at the end of last year, but since then I have been completely sporadic with it, no real consistency at all. At some point, I started to limit myself by this decision that I really didn't have to make. Do I want to continue with learning how to play better and better, or do I want to try to start composing music instead? I really enjoy learning theory, more than I like practicing the not very interesting music accessible to me at my current level of ability. This Black Friday I fell to the pull of holiday sales and bought FL Studio and a midi controller and have been messing around with some basic music composition since. Unfortunately, I'm still not the most consistent at making time for it, but I'm hopeful to make it into a habit soon when I have a bit more control over my free time.
It's been really fun so far. I feel like I'm completely out of my depth trying to do anything but thankfully there's so much info online to learn from, though that in itself makes it is kind of hard to know where to start sometimes. There are moments where I learn something about theory that sets my brain on fire, or when something I'm making starts to feel like something real and I can't believe it. I don't have anything that sounds good to show off, but I promise you that I will have something I am willing to release publicly by the end of 2026.
So yeah, that's everything about music. I took a really open approach to it this year, but I think 2026 is a year to focus in on specific things and hopefully I can stay committed and have some cool things to show for it by the end.
[1] The ground rules for this were not too strict. "New" just meant something I hadn't listened to before, not necessarily released in 2025. I counted EPs as albums as long as they were at least four or five songs. And the exact pacing was not too important, I didn't need it to be exactly three a week. There were times where I was ahead of schedule or trailing behind, but I wanted to end with 156 albums by the end of the year.
[2] The new zoomer trend of modding an old iPod or buying a dedicated digital audio player is pretty tempting for this reason. I am a big fan of single use gadgets these days, and I think having to be more intentional with music selection would be a lot of fun. I am really considering something like a iPod Nano with 4GB of space that I have to very specifically plan around.
[3] In a funny twist of fate, her tour continued in Japan after finishing in North America, and lined up while I was in Japan on vacation. I did see that she was playing while I was there, but it was in Yokohama on a day we were busy, and I figured it was okay since I had just seen her a month earlier at a show directed at an english speaking audience. I didn't find out that she performed with a live band and chorus until a few months later, but man am I now sad about what could have been.