🎵 May 2025
Feels like Spring.
Almost half way there — seven months left in 2025.
Gold Beach, Oregon 2024
📸 annie lundgren
May’s playlist cover was taken one day after we finished principal photography on our film PELICAN last year in Gold Beach. It was such a fun shoot, so I love seeing this photograph. It holds the gratitude we felt that morning. I’m still grateful we took the risk of making this film. I will have a lot to say about that risk and what this film means to us in the coming months. I’m still relishing our work this summer during our final post-production push.
As spring descended in May, it brought along another amazing batch of songs. It’s been feeling more and more difficult to keep my playlists to 20 tracks. Just two weeks ago, several hundred songs were in my May queue. Inevitably, they all get whittled down organically to my favorite twenty. It’s a beautiful process — gradually getting to those tunes I love hearing and feeling most.
So lucky to get new records this month from Robert Forster, Haim, Alien Boy and Matt Beringer. Thom Yorke’s Tall Tales with Mark Pritchard is also terrific and THE SPIRIT is one of my favorite Yorke vocals. He said he always wanted to sing like Mark Mulcahy and he almost does here.
And then there’s the Philly band Friendship — whose record CAVEMAN WAKES UP is an alt-country stunner that will likely be a top ten LP for me in 2025. Dan Wriggins has this weary, ragged baritone I love because it gives a voice to his doomed characters living on the margins. The final love song FANTASIA — a fantasy and a fugue — is the last track on Caveman, so I also made it the last track on the playlist.
I love when songwriting is brave and takes emotional risks. This Ben Kweller song OH DORIAN was released last Friday and it jumped right in — a brave and beautiful song for his sixteen year-old son who died in a car accident two years ago. 💔 And then there’s NOT BROKEN from Alan Sparhawk who lost his partner Mimi Parker to cancer back in 2023. They made such powerful music together for so long as Low, that it’s chilling and so moving to hear Alan’s call and response vocal with their daughter Hollis.
Alan sings Oh that sound, it’s too damn loud, hold it down, hold it down and Hollis comes in, uncannily like Mimi, with a kind of prophetic peace — It’s not broken, I’m not angry. ❤️
I love springtime in Oregon, because March and April teases us with its riches — the daily temperature swings are astounding. But when it finally, fully descends in May and June, we remember what spring feels like. And the bloom all around us also happens inside us. Yet another opportunity for a fresh start — another chapter break with new life springing up. I hope some of these songs bring some joy and catharsis to you this month and that we all continue to support the artists we love.
Find it here on Apple Music and Spotify.
Gary
