What a year 2025 was for Stevie Nicks fans!
At the beginning of the year, the box set “Fleetwood Mac: 1975 to 1987” compiled the five albums by the band on which Nicks appeared. In late summer, the long-awaited CD and vinyl reissues of the long out-of-print 1973 album “Buckingham Nicks” by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckham was finally released. At the end of the year, Nicks’ multi-platinum 1981 solo album “Bella Donna” (MoFi) was reissued in a beautifully boxed, limited edition (numbered), double LP, Ultradisc One-Step pressing by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, as part of the Original Master Recording series. Spinning at 45 RPM, the songs from the album, including the massive hit singles “Edge of Seventeen,” the Tom Petty duet “Stop Dragging My Heart Around,” the Don Henley duet “Leather and Lace,” and the dramatic title track, have never sounded so good. Your turntable will thank you.
Jeff Tweedy is one of those musicians who simply has too much music in him to be contained in one musical unit. Still at the helm of the Grammy Award-winning Wilco, he also has connections to multiple musical acts, including Uncle Tupelo, Golden Smog, The Minus 5, and others. He’s also released solo albums with the triple disc set “Twilight Override” (dBpm) being the latest. Thirty songs in total, Tweedy draws on his various musical influences, including alternative country (“Betrayed,” “KC Rain,” the title track), folk (“Throwaway Lines,” “Amar Bharati”), modern rock (“Lou Reed Was My Babysitter,” “Enough,” “No One’s Moving On,” “Out In The Dark,” “Caught Up In The Past”) experimentation (“Better Song”), and there’s even a spoken word track (“Parking Lot”). “Twilight Override” is an ambitious project that succeeds.
Like Tweedy, Juliana Hatfield is a musical artist who can’t be confined to just one group. Her CV, which includes Blake Babies, The Lemonheads, Some Girls, The Juliana Hatfield Three, and others, confirms that. “Blood,” her previous solo album of all-original material, was one of the best of 2021. Following a few difficult years in her personal life, Hatfield returns with “Lightning Might Strike” (American Laundromat). A testament to her resilience, in which she sings about loss (“Constant Companion,” “Ashes”), depression (“Long Slow Nervous Breakdown,” “I Fall Apart”), resolve (“Scratchers,” “My House is Not My Dream House”), and loneliness (“Harmonizing With Myself”). To her credit, Hatfield does so in musical settings that are unexpectedly catchy and inviting.
There are some people who never got over TV on the Radio going on hiatus in the late 2010s. The band did regroup for some tour dates in 2024 and 2025 (minus Dave Sitek), but there’s no word on a new album yet. Thankfully, lead vocalist Tunde Adebimpe released his first solo album, “Thee Black Boltz” (Sub Pop) in 2025. Hearing Adebimpe’s instantly recognizable voice will no doubt provide some comfort to TOTR fans, and songs such as “God Knows,” “Magnetic,” “Drop,” “Ate The Moon,” “Pinstack,” “Streetlight Nueve,” and the electro banger “Somebody Knew” prove that he can flourish on his own.
In the early 1980s, Peter Holsapple was a member of The dB’s, one of the seminal college rock bands, along with R.E.M., The Feelies, The Bongos, Let’s Active, Hüsker Dü, Mission of Burma, and others. He also played with Continental Drifters, as well as the above-mentioned R.E.M., and released a few albums with former dB’s bandmate Chris Stamey. On his new solo album, “The Face of 68” (Label 51), produced by college rock hero Don Dixon, Holsapple addresses aging (the title track), crate digging (“That Kind of Guy”), and loss (“So Sad About Sam” and “Larger Than Life”), among other subjects.
Robert Forster has released almost as many solo albums as he did as a member of beloved Australian band The Go-Betweens (“Streets of Your Town”), a group he co-founded with the late Grant McLennan in 1977. Not since William Carlos Williams ate the plums has there been a confession as delicious at the title track of Forster’s new album “Strawberries” (Tapete), a song on which he is joined by his forgiving wife Karin. The erotic (and humorous) mini-epic “Breakfast On The Train” is something to which anyone who stayed in a hotel with thin walls can relate. “All Of This Time” would sound good on Sirius XMU and “Diamonds” sparkles ominously.
