Ya '25: turning it up, then back down

Same ritual as last time: a song goes in the current playlist when it makes me feel something, and I start a new one whenever it feels right. This is the first one I made in 2025, and the third in the series. After a detour into naming it by the month, I went back to “Ya”. It’s also the first one I kept in Spotify.

I think I was in a better place making this one than I was during the first 2024 playlist. Reading it back, I can hear that. I can also hear that “better” doesn’t mean the heavy stuff went away.

Thirteen songs, about 55 minutes.

The list

It starts with someone who’s tired of being sad

The first song is Mac Miller’s “Good News”, from Circles, the album finished and released after he died. It’s about being worn out by your own head and just wanting a little peace. It’s quiet and kind of drowsy, and it’s the most honest opening I could have picked without trying.

This was the year I really started to like Mac Miller. He shows up twice here, at the beginning and near the end, and both songs are from that same album. Every playlist since 2024-09 seems to have an artist I’m in the middle of discovering. Then it was Daniel Caesar. This time it was Mac.

Then come two songs from The National, a band built for this. “I Need My Girl” is missing someone so much it’s almost all you can think about. “The Alcott”, with Taylor Swift, is two people circling back to each other and talking past each other the whole time. For the first three songs, it picks up the thread 2024-09 left hanging: wanting someone, and not quite reaching them.

Then a run of songs that say it’s okay

Songs four through six read like I was talking myself through something. “It’s Alright 2 Cry” is pretty much what it says. Pearl Jam’s “Present Tense” is about letting go of regret and living in the moment you’re actually in. (Pearl Jam also closed out Ya, my first 2024 playlist. They skipped a playlist and came back.) And Jeremy Zucker’s “always, i’ll care” is a soft goodbye: the relationship is over, but the caring isn’t.

Permission to cry, permission to stop looking back, permission to still care. I’ll take that as progress.

And then it actually turns up

This is where it gets different from both 2024 playlists. Kid Cudi’s “Neverland” is him singing over acoustic guitar instead of rapping, about still being alive through the ups and downs. He called it the start of a new era for himself, which feels about right for where it lands in the playlist.

Right after it, the energy jumps. Two Miley Cyrus songs, “End of the World” and “Walk of Fame” with Brittany Howard, then Selena Gomez and benny blanco’s “Bluest Flame”. These are big, bright, produced songs you could actually move to.

Spotify scores songs on things like energy and how happy they sound, and the numbers back this up. The first six songs sit low on energy and are mostly acoustic. By “Walk of Fame”, energy is at 0.94 out of 1, the happiest-sounding song on the playlist, and the acoustic guitars are gone. Nothing in either 2024 playlist got this loud. Ya never got off the couch, and 2024-09 was for walking the dog after dark.

Then it comes back down

It doesn’t stay up. “Hand Me Downs” brings Mac back, slower and more vulnerable. Miley’s “Something Beautiful” closes her album about healing and finding beauty in the dark. Then the last song I added was “Silver Springs”.

“Silver Springs” is Stevie Nicks’s Fleetwood Mac song about someone she couldn’t get away from, and couldn’t let get away from her. My version is a cover by Matt Berninger, The National’s singer, and Gail Ann Dorsey. By Spotify’s numbers, it’s the lowest-energy song on the playlist, and one of the saddest-sounding.

Ya ended on “Just Breathe”. 2024-09 ended on a song about being gone. This one ended on that. I’m not sure what to make of it, other than that a better year still has a ghost in it.

What I notice now

I kept going forward. Ya was almost all 1990s and 2000s music, the stuff I grew up on. 2024-09 is where that changed, and this one kept going: half of it came out in 2025, and most of the rest is from the last decade. The present tense theme is right there in the track list.

It has a shape: down, up, down. Heavy and acoustic, then a stretch that’s genuinely fun, then back to quiet. The middle is the part that’s new for me.

Matt Berninger is all over it. He sings on both National songs and on “Silver Springs”, so three of the thirteen songs are his voice. If one person soundtracked this playlist, it’s him. Or Mac.

A lot of these are conversations. “The Alcott”, “Walk of Fame”, “Bluest Flame”, “Silver Springs”: two voices, a lot of back-and-forth, like the songs are working something out between two people. Make of that what you will.

Mac Miller bookends the heavy parts. His songs show up right where the playlist is lowest, and Circles is an album about getting through it, made by someone who didn’t get to finish it himself. I think that’s part of why it got to me this year.

On to the next one.

Written with AI, edited by a guy who put three Miley Cyrus songs on one playlist and stands by it. Claude (made by Anthropic) did the heavy lifting on the words. Every song, every feeling and the final say were mine.