“Funny how a melody sounds like a memory”
— Eric Church, Springsteen
Every year I build a playlist of songs released that year that somehow find me at the right moment. I don’t do it with strategy; I just add what moves me at the time. By the time December rolls around, that playlist has become something else entirely: a living archive of the year I just lived.
Today I bundled up in snow pants and trudged through the snow for my final walk to the lake in 2025 and listened to that playlist straight through. With each song, I wasn’t just hearing music, I was being dropped back into moments. Places. Versions of myself. It reminded me how melodies don’t just pass through time; they are permanently linked to memories.
Lauren Mayberry’s solo album will always take me back to seeing her live at the Fine Line by myself in January. I danced alone, fully present, feeling both independent and deeply connected all at once. It was a good way to start the year.
Role Model’s Kansas Anymore (The Longest Goodbye) is inseparable from car rides with my daughter. She drove us around town this spring and summer with her permit while we sang along, laughed, and enjoyed driving without a destination.
Lady Gaga’s Mayhem brings me straight back to live-streaming Coachella for two weekends in a row in April while my daughter recovered from wisdom tooth surgery. We curled up together, making it our own kind of festival from the basement rec room. It felt like we were there.
HAIM’s I Quit will forever belong to a mother-son trip to Chicago in June. The album dropped that weekend, and I played it on repeat—on the plane, train rides through the city, and in the hotel room. After spending the day visiting the Chicago sites, my favorite times of the trip were evenings relaxing in our hotel room on the 35th floor overlooking the city.
Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend, Sombr’s I Barely Know Her, and Royel Otis’s Hickey, are permanently linked in my mind because they all arrived within a two-week span in late August when I was doing long solo drives across northern Minnesota for work. Through mile after mile of forests and water, those albums became enjoyable companions to sing out loud in the car.
Djo’s The Crux and The Crux (Deluxe) were the soundtrack of driving to and from soccer August – October. The Beatles-like sound, and the fact that Joe Keery is also Steve Harrington in Stranger Things, just captured my heart and wouldn’t let go.
Lorde’s Virgin brings me back to dancing my heart out at the Armory with family and friends. There was so much energy in the room I could feel it beating through my body (which is very Lorde, IYKYK 🙂).
There were so many good albums this year I could go on and on!
Music does this so effortlessly. Like the lake, it reflects what’s above the surface while holding everything that moves beneath. Long after the year fades, these songs will still be there, ready to pull me back—not just to what happened, but to how it felt.
Happy New Year!
My Favorite Albums of 2025
- Vicious Creature, Lauren Mayberry
- Kansas Anymore (The Longest Goodbye), ROLE MODEL
- Rushmere, Mumford & Sons
- Mayhem, Lady Gaga
- Foxes in the Snow, Jason Isbell
- SABLE, fABLE, Bon Iver
- I Quit, Haim
- Virgin, Lorde
- Eternal Sunshine Deluxe: Brighter Days Ahead, Ariana Grande
- The Crux and The Crux (Deluxe), Djo
- SWAG, Justin Bieber
- Hickey, Royel Otis
- I Used to Know Her, Sombr
- Man’s Best Friend, Sabrina Carpenter
- The Dream, The Favors
- The Art of Loving, Olivia Dean
- Returning to Myself, Brandi Carlile
- Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, Haley Williams
- Mount Pleasant EP, Kelsea Ballerini
- Fall Back EP, Florence Road
Moriya Rufer is a lake biologist with 20 years experience working with and loving lakes in northern Minnesota.
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