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YEAR IN REVIEW
Musical mayhem: The Cog 2025 playlist
I was a teenager during the golden age of the mixtape. In eighth grade, I got a white boombox for my birthday. It had an AM/FM radio, which meant, if I timed it just right, I could record song premieres played by Long Island’s WLIR (where the motto was “Dare to be Different”). And it had a double tape deck, which allowed me to dub from one tape to another.
And then there was the J-card, that little ruled paper insert that lined the inside of the plastic cassette case. Sometimes writing the tracklist on the J-card and creating just the right spine art took as much time as recording the tape.
I made mixtapes for all kinds of reasons. I made one for my friend Liza, who hosted me and my college roommates in her Brooklyn apartment during freshman spring break. All of the songs on that one mentioned New York. Another time, I made one for a guy I had just started dating. Something homemade seemed like the perfect way to say, I thought of you, but didn’t want to scare you off by spending money on you.
Mixtapes enabled my entire generation to say everything without saying anything at all.
Today, we make playlists, not mixtapes. And the process is very different.
Spotify, the most popular music streaming service on the planet, proudly calls their playlist-making process “seamless.” In seconds, you can create a playlist based on a favorite artist or a single song. You can build a shared playlist with a friend. You can even request a playlist by describing a vibe — “a folksy Christmas mix for a tree trimming party,” for example. If you run a 10-minute mile, Spotify can generate a playlist of songs with 150ish beats per minute to keep you going.
It is seamless. But at the risk of sounding like the cranky Gen Xer I am, the seams are where all the good stuff is hidden.
For the third year in a row, we’ve created a playlist for Cog based on the eclectic mix of songs and artists mentioned in 227 stories we published throughout the year. There are a lot of seams.
When I first told my husband I was working on this project again, he wondered if I used artificial intelligence to unearth all the mentions of music from this year’s personal essays and political commentaries. My answer was an adamant, “No.” After all, when you use AI, the machine does most of the learning, and where’s the fun in that? I wanted to comb through our contributors’ words to be reminded of how our writers used music in their essays, what lyrics they quoted and which musical moments became main characters in 2025.
The year started with two Pulitzer Prize-winning songwriters: Bob Dylan, the subject of “A Complete Unknown,” and Kendrick Lamar, whose Super Bowl halftime performance taught us all a little something about diss tracks and earworms.
Music reminded us of what we’ve lost and what we’ve found. Where we’ve been, and where we’re going.
This year was also the year of big musical anniversaries: the 40th anniversary of Les Misérables, the 50th anniversary of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” the 115th anniversary of “America the Beautiful.”
There were reunion tours: Oasis, Blues Traveler, Gin Blossoms and Spin Doctors all got back together, giving Katie Kurtzman the opportunity to chase the soundtrack of her youth (and inspiring the rest of us to ask, “Why didn’t I think of that?”). And then there was the much-anticipated — and much-debated — 12th studio album from Taylor Swift (“'The Life a Showgirl' is pure fun. That's all it needs to be”).
Music helped us feel understood — as a teenager, an immigrant, a grieving brother and a struggling nation. And it helped bring us closer to the people we love: a father taking piano lessons with his son, a girl and her grandmother watching Hulk Hogan wrestle on Saturday mornings.
Of course, singers and songwriters don’t just inspire us: They inspire each other. Our playlist includes two recordings of Ghost (the folk version from “My Newport Miracle” and the Justin Bieber original from “There are a lot of rules for throwing a great party.”) We published an entire essay about the forgotten meaning of Katharine Lee Bates’ “America the Beautiful”; another one mentioned Carrie Underwood’s performance of the song at President Trump’s inauguration.
There was a second highly anticipated musical biopic — this time about Bruce Springsteen — on the big screen in late 2025. And on the small screen, on “Saturday Night Live,” Paul Simon, an 84-year-old icon, played “Homeward Bound” with 26-year-old pop star Sabrina Carpenter. We covered both.
Like the Simon-Carpenter duet, our playlist is an intergenerational affair.
And with the Cog playlist you can’t end up on the wrong side of the algorithm because there isn’t one. It’s just musical mayhem — in the best possible way. Unrelated songs, unpredictable surprises and the kind of music that, like the stories we produce, reminds you we’re all part of something bigger than ourselves.
