I’m not a music streamer, except occasionally on Bandcamp when I’m checking out artists I’m not familiar with, but my son is. He’s a touring musician, a guitarist, and we’re often comparing notes on our listening experiences. The service he uses collects and shares all sorts of data on his listening habits, and every year he has me guess what his Top Five played artists are. I think I only got two of his right this year; he guessed three of mine but my “top five” is more of a hunch as I don’t have any actual as I listen primarily on the devices pictured above: two iPod, the gold one on the right the U2 signed special edition I had customized with a terabyte chip and a trio of HIDIZS AP80 PRO-X mp3 players, also with terabyte chips and the entire collection of music I’ve amassed over several (ahem) decades. I’ll never move to a streamer and am unlikely to go beyond my test listens (and purchases) in Bandcamp; I enjoy the ritual of updating the databases on all my players with purchases of (mostly) physical media, and I prefer not to contribute any more personal data on my preferences to the Advertosphere than I have to.

And yet, here I am, telling any marketing bot that happens to listen what I listen to—well, the joke’s on you, bot! I’ll buy anything these artists create anyway!

So, here’s the top five of who I listened to in 2025; I think the order is right but no service I know of was keeping tabs on me:

1. Nick Cave and Family—includes the Bad Seeds, the Birthday Party, Dirty Three, Nick & Warren Ellis’s soundtrack work, some Mick Harvey solo material, Grinderman. Top spins: This Train I Ride OST by Warren Ellis, Push the Sky Away and Wild God by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Also, the 20,000 Days on Earth film.
2. The Church Top Spins: Starfish, Of Skins and Heart
3. Van Morrison Top Spins: Live at Orangefield, Astral Weeks, Remembering Now
4. Drive-By Truckers and Family—includes Jason Isbell, solo Patterson Hood, a Shonna Tucker album Top Spins: Shonna Tucker’s A Tell All, DBT’s A Southern Rock Opera and American Band
5. The Cramps—Songs the Lord Taught Us, Psychedelic Jungle/Gravest Hits

Even Top Spins is a bit misleading, because what I tend to do with an artist once I decide their music speaks to me is to go out and try to acquire their entire catalog and every side project they may have been significantly involved in, and then I’ll listen to the catalog over and over again as though performing an odd type of psychic archaeology, both within the artist(s) psyche(s) and my own, looking for intersections. Sometimes it takes years for the “click” to happen; I’d had single Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album and a half dozen Van Morrisson albums for years; the clicks for each happened about three years ago and then it was off to the record store to purchase everything I’d missed. I should mention only The Church is new to me this year; for whatever reason it dawned on me how much I loved “The Unguarded Moment” and “Under the Milky Way” and decided I should probably check out an album and thank goodness I did; what a deep ocean of sound to bathe in.

Deep oceans—it is telling, to me, that all the artists above (except, tragically, the Cramps) have vast bodies of work spanning several decades, and also that they (again, except for the Cramps) are mostly older than me (Jason Isbell and Shonna Tucker being the top-of-mind exceptions) and all putting out some of the finest work of their already exceptional careers. #6 on the list likely would have been Fish and Marillion. Meaningful.

I like some of the kids though as well. Wet Leg is great, as is Shane Guerrette, Coma Hole, and Samara Joy. I’ve already written about Ethel Cain, and I’m a huge fan of the prolific and consistently wonderful Charley Crockett.

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Strange to me that there wasn’t any metal in the Top Five as it has been my go-to genre for much of my life; I’d written about a hundred record reviews for Metal Express Radio a few years ago. Despite no metal artists cracking the Top Five (Iron Maiden and family were no doubt #7 and have been somewhere in the top ten my whole life), my aural diet was still mineral rich. I had Spirit World on heavy rotation, their new one Helldorado and Deathwestern and all the singles from Bandcamp. Also listened to a lot of Type O Negative, The Gathering, A-Z (Ray Alder from Fates Warning on vocals), and I discovered Cynic and Beyond Creation for the first time.

On the other end of the scale, I listen to a great deal of jazz, especially Lounge music. Like, a lot of it. Les Baxter, Martin Denny, Esquivel, the Ultra Lounge series, Julie London, Anita O’Day, Sinatra, Combustible Edison, all combined in a gigantic playlist.

Last post I mentioned reading two books about The Church, as well as a book by Nick Cave and one by Warren Ellis. When That Rough God Goes Riding by Greil Marcus (@grielmarcus here on substack) may be the best of many books I’ve read on the work of Van the Man, and any fan of the Cramps (and whoever isn’t a fan of the Cramps needs to explain themselves) really needs to read Journey to the Center of the Cramps by Dick Porter. The story and relationship of Lux Interior and Poison Ivy really should be celebrated as one of the most beautiful unions in the history of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Speaking of Rock ‘n’ Roll, I wrote a novel which in some ways is a love letter to the form, Aural History . Please consider supporting my efforts by clicking the cover or link and purchasing a copy.

Aural History - Kindle edition by Waters, Daniel. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.