Hello & Goodbye, 2025
by John Amen
Ego stepped back, as if to usher the world & all its passing content to the front of the stage. The winter solstice hit, & it spun out of control, lashing & writhing like Leatherface at the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Long, inky nights, weeks in the saddle, in the grass, looking for a fire. I don’t know how I ended up here, seems like the starting gun went off a moment ago …?
Art, of course, lined the gauntlets: Simic, whose surreal poems make more & more sense; Graves’ version of The Greek Myths, those tales that grow more & more relevant; Baldwin, whose comments about “shadow”, individually & collectively, are forever apt; Modiano’s Out of the Dark; Jarmusch’s Dead Man; Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; &, at least over the last couple of months, the work of Ana Roxanne.
As far as albums that came out this year, I’ll skip my “favs” list & mention a few projects that struck me as unique or otherwise captivating: Agriculture’s The Spiritual Sound, Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band’s New Threats from the Soul, Geese’s Getting Killed, Little Simz’s Lotus, billy woods’ Golliwog, & Armand Hammer’s Mercy. Stunningly underrated, in my opinion, were: The Murder Capital’s Blindness, Jiles & Grubby Pawz’ Griot, The Beaches’ No Hard Feelings, Spanish Love Songs’ A Brief Intermission in the Flattening of Time, & Shrine Maiden’s A Theory of /Cloud/. &, I was flat-out stupefied by the lukewarm response to Indigo de Souza’s pop gem, Precipice.
“When the God of Fire / comes looking for fire / that’s a bad sign.” —Johnny Coley
“When you see every moment is new, every moment is fresh, every moment is changing, every moment is arising—that’s reality.” —Sayadaw U Tejaniya
Best wishes to everyone for an inspired 2026,
John Amen
December 31, 2025
