We’re marking another trip around the sun with a look back at what we did with it. Come along for the next one if you like what you see!
We put out 23 editions of Ponytail Picks in 2025, covering the following themes (in chronological order):
Expectations
Fire
Risk
Work
Spring
Canada
Birthdays
Japan
Peace
Wind
Pride
Luck
Dance
Mistakes
Dogs
Rivers
Home
Success
Grief
Stars
Small
Rich
Busy
As a basis for our favourites of 2025, we each chose one that we feel best summed up our year.
Which theme resonates with you when you think about your 2025?
Andrew’s choice
Rivers
This was a tough choice for me. I could’ve picked “Canada” because I spent a lot more time than usual thinking about my home country this year and what it means to be from here. I could’ve picked “Work” because out of all the themes listed above, it most accurately describes how I spent my time. But I chose “Rivers” because it covers the most ground, from the most angles.
If I look at the books I read and the world as it was in 2025, the most obvious lesson is that from our actions flow consequences. But the River of Experience doesn’t always afford us that kind of control, and our lives are often defined by how we respond to the aftermath—a message expressed in two of the best films I watched this year, 2023’s Sing Sing and this year’s Train Dreams.
Another “river” on display in our culture this year, one I covered in the post in September, is that of influence. Nowhere was this more clear than in my favourite 2025 release, Geese’s Getting Killed. Anyone following music in the last few months is probably sick of hearing this, but Getting Killed is one of those rare examples of an acclaimed cultural artifact that deserves all the attention and praise it’s getting. Listening to it front to back for the first time in October, I heard everything from high school faves like Radiohead and the Strokes to music-degree fodder like African tribal dance and Gregorian chant. Part of loving Geese this year involved reading about other people loving Geese and feeling comfort in knowing:
a) you’re in good company; and
b) you love this music for good reason—it resonates with a very specific type of person, of which you are an example.
I was reminded of this just today, after reading these outtakes from Grayson Haver Currin’s GQ profile of the band’s singer, Cameron Winter. Cameron is just over 15 years my junior, and yet I recognized some striking similarities between his musical upbringing and my own.1 It reminded me a bit of this old essay I posted almost three years ago about how cultural impact and influence are much more subtle actors than we often recognize. Maybe it’s time I write another??
Joel’s choice
Home
My first instinct was to choose “busy,” because that’s how this year has felt, but a much more pleasant lens through which to reflect upon my busy year is home, given that a lot of the busyness was due to my wife and I purchasing and moving to our first house this past summer and fall. The idea of home seemed to reverberate through a lot of the media I enjoyed in 2025 as well.
Kicking things off was The Wild Robot, which I watched last New Year’s Eve (so yes, technically 2024) with a few of my siblings. A gorgeous picture about building a home that unsurprisingly was one of my picks for the Ponytail Picks edition linked above. It set the stage for a year where the majority of the movies I watched were at home, with my home people (my daughter and my wife). In the midst of all the busyness I became extra grateful for our weekly movie night tradition because it was often the only movie I would watch each week!
One of our watches was of course KPop Demon Hunters, picked by my wife (all three of us took turns) ahead of the popularity curve, only a couple days after it came out! The hunters’ homebody couch chant was an early memorable moment.
Other family movie night highlights included movies like Freaky Friday and A Goofy Movie (both extreme and regular versions), all movies that have a home family dynamic at their core.
My highest rated movie watch of 2025, though, was the wonderful Riddle of Fire, a quirky little kid-venture movie that begins and ends at home with video games and blueberry pie.
Favourite listens of 2025 included the third album of Pedro the Lion’s “musical memoir” series, Santa Cruz, a detailed depiction of David Bazan adjusting to life after a move to California as a teen, and David Francey’s Skating Rink, the coziest of folk albums, especially when you’re warm at home on a frigid winter day.
Some of my favourite reads from 2025 also had home at their core, like The Hobbit (similar in narrative structure and even genre to Riddle of Fire—again, see my write-up in Ponytail Picks #74), The Shining, and The Borrowers—the latter two which bore a surprising similarity in how the central home in each proved to be not as welcoming as the main characters might’ve originally hoped.
New year, new themes. What fresh picks and puns will we come up with? We’ll try not to keep you
waiting.
Avoiding Bob Dylan until I was 18 out of fear I would hate something important; being introduced to the Beatles via Magical Mystery Tour; preferring composers inspired by Gregorian chant like Fauré over Gregorian chant itself; educating myself as a teenager by “listening to whatever I was supposed to on a daily basis;” this quote: “But when you get there, the reward isn’t that now you get it and now you get to be part of this club that gets music more than other people. The reward is the album itself. The reward is that you actually get something out of this thing you didn’t get anything out of before. It makes life a little better, in my experience.” Basically, I was cutting grass instead of walking dogs, but nearly everything else applied to an eerily accurate level.