Pancho’s Picks: My Favorite Music of 2025
Looking back on the records, the roads, and the nights that stayed with me.
2025 was one hell of a year for music — the kind that doesn’t just play through your speakers, but moves into your bloodstream and starts living there. And when I look back, a few records rise above the rest like campfires burning bright on a long West Texas night.
Albums that will live in the canon.
Matt Moran’s The Ba’ar led the charge for me. A record rough as cedar bark and tender in the right places, the kind that feels like a man telling you the truth he didn’t want to say out loud.
Then came Colter Wall’s 1800 Miles — all dust, distance, and heartbreak stitched together with that ancient-sounding voice he carries around like an heirloom.
And Turnpike’s The Price of Admission may be their most lived-in record yet… full of scars, wisdom, and the kind of writing you only earn the hard way.
Vandoliers Life behind bars Took me back into the sunlight knowing damn well not everybody’s rooting for ’us But here’s the trick: We quit living for other people. Every song carries a tone of we survived you, and we’re still here.
Jason Isbell’s Foxes in the Snow capped off the list — quiet, cold, honest, and heavy in the way only Isbell can pull off. A winter album that finds the warm places in a man’s heart and sits there awhile.
Singles That Stopped Me in My Tracks
This year had its share of one-off punches too:
Gedda’s “Thick as Thieves” — a song so sharp it practically demanded an album around it, which he delivered with South of Mars.
Turnpike’s cover of Todd Snider’s “Just Like Old Times” — the kind of cover that wakes up every demon you thought you’d already sent packin’.
James McMurtry’s “South Texas Lawman”— dry as mesquite smoke and smart as a whip.
Best Concerts of the Year
I caught some unforgettable shows this year:
Ryan Bingham, burning hot as ever, Robert Earl Keen, returning like a long-lost uncle who still knows how to hold a crowd in his hands, Red Shahan, wild-eyed and wonderful.
But the night that will stay with me long after 2025 is gone was standing beside my wife and two of our grandkids, listening to Ray Wylie Hubbard howl, joke, stomp, and testify like only he can.
That wasn’t just a concert — it was a memory carved in oak.
If the music we love says anything about the year we lived, then 2025 was full of grit, grace, and damn good stories.
Here’s to more of all three in the new one.
— Pancho’s Picks
Ridin’ for the real ones, year after year.
