My Favorite Music of 2025

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.

A Todd Snider tribute that hits like truth you didn’t want to remember

Not only did the Turnpike Troubadours just drop their cover of Todd Snider’s “Just Like Old Times,” but damn if it ain’t one of the greatest songs I’ve heard all year.

Not because it’s shiny.

Not because it’s hyped.

But because it’s honest.

Snider wrote that tune like a motel-room confession. A little funny, a little sad, a little dangerous — the kind of story you only tell when the night’s late enough and the silence is heavy enough to pull it out of you.

Turnpike stepped into that world like they’d lived it themselves. The fiddle aches. The steel sighs. And Evan Felker sings like a man who’s seen both sides of his own shadow.

It’s reverent without being precious — a tribute from one set of outlaws to the patron saint of all the misfits.

But this song… this one wakes things up in a man.

Listening to their version stirred up plenty of demons I thought I’d laid to rest. I’ve spent more nights than I like to admit under neon bar lights chasing things that were never meant for me. Women, drugs, chaos — whatever numbed the hurt for a little while. I prioritized the wrong things and broke the right ones. I caused damage to myself and to people who cared. I told lies, made excuses, ran from consequences until the law — and life — finally caught up to me.

Songs like “Just Like Old Times” don’t just entertain you. They remind you of the rooms you shouldn’t have been in, the roads you shouldn’t have taken, the parts of yourself you barely survived.

That’s the magic of Todd Snider: he wrote for the lost and the found. And that’s the magic of Turnpike covering him: they kept that flame alive.

https://music.apple.com/us/album/just-like-old-times/1854586074?i=1854586501

I’ve talked a lot about music, memories, and mistakes — but let me be real with y’all:

I’ve been through the worst of times too. Not the “tough season, little stressed” kind of bad. I’m talking bottom. The kind of bottom where you can’t look at yourself, where the phone stops ringing, where the darkness starts whispering that maybe you’re done. I was on the verge of cashing it all in. I didn’t think there was anything left worth fighting for. But there was.

And somehow — through grace, through grit, through people who refused to give up on me — I found a way out. One small step, one shaky breath, one honest day at a time.

So if you’re reading this and you’re in that place right now, hear me clearly:

You are not alone. Not in your pain, not in your fear, not in your struggle. There are options. There are opportunities.

There are hands willing to reach for you, even when you can’t see them through the fog.

Stay one more day. Hold on one more minute. Your story isn’t finished

— not by a long shot.

If a stubborn, hard-lived soul like me can crawl out of the wreckage and stand here today — clean, grateful, hopeful, alive — then you can too.

Life is still worth living.

You just gotta stay long enough to see the next sunrise.

Life Gets Lifey

Life Gets Lifey is what I always like to say, what I really mean, is that things happen beyond my control. It’s how I react to them is what really matters, I mean like this blog , call it writers block, laziness, or something else. I also really don’t care what anyone thinks of me. That is what makes me, well me.

For the most part, my life rocks . I mean just last weekend I found myself on the Baylor campus in Waco Texas for something that was better than I could have ever imagined. The wife got me tickets to The Boys from Oklahoma, featuring Cross Canadian Ragweed, Turnpike Troubadours, Shane Smith and the Saints , and American Aquarium.. next thing i know there’s Wade Bowen on the bill.. then a series of other amazing performances by several of all my all time favorites throughout the night , including Pat Green and Robert Earl Keen.

Add in the final song of the night , Django Walker, son of the world famous late Jerry Jeff. Django sang a song that his daddy made famous which in my opinion helped to put songwriter Guy Clark on the map.

LA Freeway.

The whole concert had this kinda energy.. it was really something to see in person.

When the Turnpike Troubadours got back together a year or so ago, I recall, tweeting.. “all we need now is for Ragweed to come back”

Well.. now they have and I got to see them live in person after a 16 plus year’s hiatus..

And Gawddamn I am happy!

Pancho.