The Southampton band Delays fell off my radar after their 2004 debut Faded Seaside Glamour. I had not realized that frontman Greg Gilbert died in 2021 from cancer. His high singing voice, which made many assume the group was led by a female vocalist, was key to their lilting, soaring sound.
This is not the sort of admission you normally get from LuPone. As The New Yorker's Michael Schulman put it in a very entertaining profile of her last year, "LuPone is Broadway’s reigning grande dame, with a big voice and an even bigger mouth. She’s one of the city’s last living broads: brassy, belty, and profane, with the ferocity of a bullet train coming right at you." Part of the fun of seeing LuPone live, I assumed, would be watching her steamroll through the evening, flexing her vocal gift while letting us Los Angeles residents know how lucky we were to be in the presence of greatness. Vulnerability was a surprise.
I grew up consuming a steady diet of pop, rock and hip-hop, largely avoiding musical theater and the sort of vocalists who belt, croon or soar. As I got older, Into the Woods and Frank Sinatra became part of my musical lexicon, but I remain more drawn to songwriters than singers. It's not as if Sinatra (or countless others) can't make a song their own -- make you feel that, for example, no one else has sung "I'll Be Around" before they breathed it into life. But I'll always take a Bob Dylan over a Michael Bublé, no matter how many octaves he's mastered.
I say all that to acknowledge that I can't always appreciate superhuman vocal technique. When it comes to singing, I go for emotion, feel and character over firepower and pizzazz. But even I sensed early on in Saturday's performance that LuPone seemed a bit off, not as confident as I imagined she would be as she flubbed a line or two. So when she stopped the show and offered her mea culpa, it got a huge, warm response from the adoring crowd, but it also confirmed what even my unsophisticated eyes and ears suspected. It also seemed to unlock something for LuPone, allowing her to fully embrace the fragility of the songs she was there to sing. Which helps enormously when you're singing about love.
The show was part of LuPone's 25th anniversary tour for Matters of the Heart, a collection of tunes that cover Broadway numbers and pop songs, happy reveries and sad ballads, and all manners of love, from parental to carnal. For this tour, which features piano and a four-person string section, she has been sticking to many of the tracks from the original album while adding some new selections, including "God Only Knows" and "The Last Time I Saw Richard," which depending on your mood might be the greatest song Joni Mitchell has ever written. But there was also "Being Alive," one of Company's show-stoppers now enjoying new life among filmgoers as "that song Adam Driver sings in Marriage Story." In the Noah Baumbach Oscar-winner, Driver's divorcing dad delivers it with the pain and regret of someone who understands the lyrics' bereft sentiments in his bones. On Saturday night, LuPone sang it like it was an aging rock band's guaranteed crowd-pleaser before they come back for the encore, her high-octane voice all showy guitar solos and flagrant smashing of instruments. I longed to hear the Driver version again.
Not unlike many Broadway albums, Matters of the Heart is a pristine rendition of familiar songs that lacks the electric spontaneity of a live performance. Plus, the record doesn't contain the bits of commentary LuPone sprinkled in on occasion during the show, helping to lay out the night's thematic through-lines. Before singing Randy Newman's "Real Emotional Girl," she told the crowd about meeting the love of her life, husband Matthew Johnston, while making the 1987 TV movie LBJ: The Early Years. She mentioned their son, calling him her greatest achievement, and then worked her way through "Real Emotional Girl," Judy Collins' "My Father" and Fascinating Aïda's "Look Mummy, No Hands," three different perspectives on childhood and the process of looking back at those strangers we call our parents. The mini-suite ended with one of her new additions to the show, Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time," which in this context was less about romance and more about the lost and regained connections between a mother and a child. LuPone never flexed, never tried to better the originals. If she wasn't in top form vocally, which my friend (a big LuPone fan) noted, she did what my favorite singers do, which is embody the song as if it's the only truth they know.
As someone who's long adored Dylan and Newman, I've been accustomed to more dazzling singers interpret their material, usually adding polish to the vocals or arrangements so that the songs become more pleasing to a wider audience. Too often, unfortunately, the very human essence of the original song gets swept aside in the name of making the tune "better." The phenomenon occasionally reared its ugly head Saturday night, most disappointingly during LuPone's performance of "The Last Time I Saw Richard," Mitchell's pained memory of a friend lost along the way. In LuPone's hands, it turned into a bit of an acted monologue, a Broadway ballad that abandoned Mitchell's direct, piercing treatment.
That said, my reaction to LuPone's interpretations definitely depended on my affinity (or lack thereof) for the originals. Two covers she performed while seated, her voice just above a whisper, practically demanding the audience lean forward to listen, were among the night's highlights. I consider "The Air That I Breathe" perfectly fine, and I had no previous knowledge of Beth Nielsen Chapman's "Sand and Water." LuPone latched onto both songs' emotional essence by pruning away their easy-listening tendencies to get at something real about, respectively, romantic contentment and the mourning of a dead spouse. And then, later in the show, she gender-flipped Dan Fogelberg's "Same Old Lang Syne" to fairly devastating effect. Much to the chagrin of my own parents, I've always considered the song sappy. Revisiting Fogelberg's version the following day, it hit harder than it ever had before. LuPone revealed the song's poignant chasm between present and past for me.
It must be both blessing and curse to have an incredible singing voice. At some point, age intercedes, diminishing your gift either incrementally or all at once. As Robert Christgau once wrote of Sinatra's 1993 Duets album, in which the Chairman of the Board struggled to prove he still had it, "He who lives by the larynx shall die by the larynx." I thought of that quote a few times Saturday night, despite LuPone remaining a far superior interpretive singer to most anyone who's ever walked the earth. Besides, I can roll with a diminished voice: Paul Simon's "A Quiet Celebration" tour from last year taught me that. If anything, the occasional lyrical lapse and false start only made LuPone's performance that much stronger and braver.
LuPone doesn't like being called a diva. In last year's New Yorker profile, she said, “I know what I’m worth to a production. I know that I’m box-office. Don’t nickel-and-dime me before you put me onstage. Don’t treat me like a piece of shit. Because, at this point, if you don’t value me, why am I there?” To be sure, LuPone has had her share of jerk moments that go beyond "Oh, she's such a delightful diva." Still, I also am wary of that sexist term since "diva" tends to be applied to powerhouse female singers who don't suffer fools.
Nonetheless, I was imagining Saturday's show to be a masterclass in grande-dame behavior, all of us mere mortals gladly paying our respects to a world-class vocalist stunning us with her instrument. Instead, I got a display of touching humanity that made songs like her evening-closing "Hello, Young Lovers" (from The King and I) and the 1940s' hit "My Best to You" feel like gentle prayers, to herself and us, to find love in a world growing darker by the day. I didn't write down what she said at the end of the night, but it was a plea that, despite the terrible country we're currently living in, that we remember that love is still a greater force than hate. It was a beautiful sentiment, almost as beautiful as these lines from "My Best to You" which she made hers:
So here's to you, may your dreams come true
May old Father Time never be unkind
And through the years, save your smiles and your tears
They're just souvenirs, they'll make music in your heart
Remember this, each new day is a kiss
Sent from up above with an angel's love
So here's to you, may your skies be blue
And your love blessed, that's my best to you
Some of the best love songs have a brittleness to them, because they know that love is delicate, always at risk of breaking if not properly handled. But maybe that's not always true -- maybe love is strong enough to outlive all of life's hard things. Even a diva's nerves.
(Photo by Jacob Earl.)
I'm seeing Patti LuPone perform this weekend. This is the opposite of that.
When you've been happily married for a while, people might get the impression that you forget what being single is like. Not true. The anxiety, insecurity, thrill, confusion, crushing despair: That sticks with you.
Which probably explains why I find Sombr's hyper-emotional, ultra-candid love songs so evocative. "Oh, right," I think, "I remember this feeling." "Back to Friends" articulates a universal sentiment with such unsubtle clarity that it takes you right back to that moment. I don't miss that time in my life. But I can't pretend it's not there still somewhere inside me.
Keeping up with new music isn't just good for the brain, it ensures you don't become one of those people who laments, "I don't know any of these acts on the Grammys/at Coachella." At the start of every January, I create a folder of notable albums that get released that year, adding to it as the months go by. (My 2025 playlist is here.) This becomes my go-to playlist, perfect for long drives across Los Angeles or time spent in my office writing. I like having music on all day, and I'd rather it be new music than songs I know by heart, no matter how much I love them.
It's been years since Pazz & Jop went away, although Uproxx did its best to keep the tradition alive in recent years. But now that Uproxx has stopped publishing its year-end critics poll, I have felt a little empty having nowhere to share my picks for the year's best albums. This is the advantage of having my own site: I can do it right here.
No matter how many years I put together a best-of album list, I always have to remind myself that you never really know a record until you listen to it from beginning to end. In our modern streaming age, the notion of the album as an artistic unit now feels terribly quaint. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't put in the effort to really understand a record by giving it your undivided attention. It's one thing to get obsessed with a song — it's something else to really live in the world of an artist's creative vision for 45-70 minutes.
The 10 albums on my list all resonated more deeply when I devoted that uninterrupted time to them. As individual tracks, maybe they aren't the most dynamic. As a cumulative experience, though, they were undeniable.
Without further ado...
10. Dijon, Baby
The inner workings of Dijon Duenas' mind, set to jittery, sensual, exuberant tunes. Detailing his experiences with marriage and fatherhood with vulnerability and candor, Baby expresses love in all its forms: carnal, paternal, utter devotion, endless adoration. So many marriages don't work out. So many parents fail their children. But this album's beauty and anguish suggest a deep soul who's been thinking about commitment for a good long time. The more the music surges with doubt, the more resilient it simultaneously becomes. The results aren't just moving — they're downright inspirational.
9. Backxwash, Only Dust Remains
Zambian-Canadian rapper Ashanti Mutinta's previous records contained more of a metal influence. She hardly went safe or mainstream with her most recent album: As Mutinta put it in May of last year, "instead of a slasher, this one is more like a weird A24 movie.” The abrasive, riveting Only Dust Remains acknowledges her struggles with suicidal ideation and the world's transphobia and bigotry, and the music is as explosive as her anger and insecurity. By the closing title track, she isn't yet out of the woods. But she's raising a "middle finger to these racists and idiots," refusing to let the bastards grind her down, including the ones in her head.
8. CMAT, Euro-Country
My favorite country album of 2025 came from Ireland. Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson taps into the genre's just-folks relatability to create a collection of sad, funny songs about dumb guys, chasing your dreams and losing a friend. The lap steel guitar is as shiny as the pop hooks. And then there's the singer who puts those big feelings across. Actresses are often praised as having a "girl next door" energy: I have mixed feelings about that compliment, but CMAT's unassuming warmth certainly brings such cliches to mind. (That said, you don't have to be a woman to feel "Take a Sexy Picture of Me" in your bones.)
7. Sudan Archives, The BPM
I flipped for Brittney Denise Parks' last album, Natural Brown Prom Queen, and this new one might be even better. Edging further into full-on dance music, The BPM ripples with confidence, the tracks barely able to contain her creative ebullience. But the faster tempos belie the anxieties she sometimes feels about love and being herself. And she's still making room for that terrific violin of hers. "I'm the finest," she brags at one point. "Yeah, I said it." She can back up her swagger.
6. Turnstile, Never Enough
This Baltimore band had largely escaped my notice until Never Enough was everywhere in 2025. Hardcore punk is not a go-to genre for me, but Brendan Yates' yearning vocals got to me. Not self-absorbed, not overly ponderous, never boringly mopey, he strikes me as a decent guy wrestling with the agonies of the world with genuine sensitivity at a time when a lot of guys are good at faking it. And his band never stops stops bringing the noise, which can be exceedingly lovely when it's not just downright stirring. I've heard some longtime fans mock Turnstile for suddenly turning into the Police. I suppose that means they're just getting more tuneful with time.
5. Apathy, Mom & Dad
As we suffer through the Trump years, Chad Bromley would like to remind us that Ronald Reagan was a pretty terrible president as well. Mom & Dad's title refers not to Bromley's birth parents, who had him when they were teenagers, but Nancy and Ronnie, whose smiling faces adorn the record's cover. Although not quite a concept album, Mom & Dad takes the listener back to the 1980s as Bromley recalls with no fondness the crack era and Reagan's war on drugs. (The rapper's parents battled drug addiction in his youth.) Turning 47 in March, Bromley grabs old-school samples and dusty pop-culture references to paint a portrait of an unhappy past that still casts a shadow on our shared horrible present. Mourning the death of the middle class, recalling the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, this album turns nostalgia into a poison pill, every line a killer.
4. Wednesday, Bleeds
Why does this Wednesday album work so well for me when their last, Rat Saw God, didn't? The answer couldn't be more rudimentary: Because it rocks harder. From the gathering storm of its opening track, "Reality TV Argument Bleeds," to the snarling destitution of "Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)" to the fire of "Wasp" into "Bitter Everyday," Karly Hartzman's band has attitude to burn and the guitars to back up their surliness. Sometimes Bleeds allows for a quieter interlude, but the focus never slips. And the Phish and Human Centipede joke in "Phish Pepsi" is a good one
3. Blood Orange, Essex Honey
Beware albums made by brilliant songwriters/composers that are overstuffed with cameos from their famous friends. That is, unless it's Essex Honey, in which Devonté Hynes brings along so many buddies to enrich his already formidable soundscape, letting them blend into the mix rather than sticking out. The result is a glorious record whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts, Hynes' sumptuous voice on top of one incredible arrangement after another. (My god, the saxophones on this album.) Who else would pair the frontman of Turnstile with the dude from Everything but the Girl? Who else would find so many ways to express grief and explore his childhood memories, yet leave so few breadcrumbs, hiding those knotty feelings in endlessly emotional, dreamlike tunes? Recommended listening for your next nighttime drive.
2. Blondshell, If You Asked for a Picture
With all due respect to the more famous Sabrina (Carpenter), I preferred Sabrina Teitelbaum's follow-up to a successful breakthrough in which the artist is bummed to discover that a higher profile does nothing to improve the quality of men in her orbit. If You Asked for a Picture doesn't have Man's Best Friend's winning sense of humor, but its well-crafted indie-rock convincingly articulates the excruciating frustration of being in your late 20s, worried that your romantic life is never ever going to get any better. There's nothing self-pitying about Teitelbaum's observations, recognizing that she's as much at fault as the jerks she decides to date. "Why don't the good ones love me?," she asks with a clarity any heartsick soul will understand. And when she closes the album with "The problem is I don't know what I want anymore," her voice reaching for a falsetto, it crushes me every time. On her debut Blondshell, she toured with Liz Phair, which made sense. Here, she continues to honor that indie legend by further roto-rooting her psyche, finding plenty of hooks if not much in the way of solutions.
1. Craig Finn, Always Been
The Hold Steady frontman always has stories to tell. But from top to bottom, I don't think he's ever crafted anything as uniformly terrific as what he achieves on his sixth solo album. Always Been mostly focuses on a former clergyman making sense of his life after leaving the church behind. But that's just one of the broken individuals whom Craig Finn embodies on this remarkable record, which musically doesn't shy away from his Springsteen-ian aspirations while also embracing a more colorful indie-rock palette. I've been making fun of the War on Drugs for years, but Adam Granduciel's production provides the perfect sonic framework for these emotional, dying-of-the-light songs.
"I told Adam that I wanted to make a direct record — I didn’t want it to be tricky," Finn said in April. "The music is very straightforward. Sometimes we’d try something and find it to be too much. It’s a storytelling record, so it was like, 'Is it getting in the way of the story? Is it supporting the story?' I think that’s a question that you just keep asking yourself."
Always Been's simplicity is its strongest asset and also the reason why listeners might overlook its greatness. Finn is the sort who's easy to take for granted: "Oh, he made another literary album about beautiful losers?!?" But the more you immerse in the record, the more its stories seem to speak to something deeper than these individual lives. It's an album about the loss of religious faith, but all different kinds of faith and hope are shed along the way on Always Been: the idea of the ideal version of who you might become, the belief that things will work out, the delusion that America was ever not rotten. The record has no hint of the momentous, and yet its unfussy directness feels plenty grand. Its landscape of depression, romantic disillusionment, crime, poverty and oblivion is as good a way of encapsulating this failed country as any album I heard in 2025.
These sorts of lessons you acquire from years attending any festival. What will be strange is that, starting next year, this knowledge will largely be irrelevant. In 2027, Sundance moves to Boulder. I've never been, but even for those who have, it will be a unique festival experience. Normally, when you go to a new festival, there's someone older who's been there a bunch and can show you the ropes and fill you in on all the little pro-tips you need. In a sense, all of us will be going through our first Sundance next year. That will be incredibly disorienting, and I'm curious how we collectively process this new place that the festival will call home.
I knew the final Park City Sundance would be bittersweet. My friends and colleagues took tons of pictures. There were final stops at Grub Steak -- I always got the meatloaf and the wild rice and mushroom soup -- and one last movie at the Eccles. But I found the overall mood more resigned and pragmatic than emotional. Two different people said to me, "Park City doesn't want us here anymore. It feels like the city has already moved on." Adding to that feeling was that, as soon as the festival ended this year, the local Holiday Village theater, which was used for press & industry screenings, was scheduled to be bulldozed. (The theater had actually been closed for a while.)
Journalists and film critics may have a lot of memories of coming to Sundance, but Park City as a whole seemed ready to be rid of us. And maybe the feeling was mutual: A fellow critic told me, in no uncertain terms, "I love Sundance, but I hate Park City," an acknowledgment, among other things, of the city and the state's conservative politics. Ironically, it turned out to be one of the warmest Sundances in memory: It was as if the city couldn't even be bothered to give visitors the obligatory snow and freezing temperatures. And then there were the horrors going on in America while we were at the festival. It was hard not to feel a little down in the mouth, despite the pleasure of being around so many people I enjoy so much.
As I've mentioned before, Sundance was my first film festival, so I have a fondness for the place. But Sundance's move creates an interesting question: Is a festival a location or something else? (I realize that Sundance actually started in Salt Lake City in the late 1970s, but I think it's fair to say most attendees associate Park City with Sundance.) A festival's ethos is woven into its location. True/False is Columbia, Missouri. Cannes is a tourist town in the south of France. If those festivals up and left, how would a new setting affect the movies I saw? It's something I've never thought about. Next year, I will a lot in Boulder.
* * * * *
But how were the actual movies at the final Sundance in Park City? Pretty darn good. Below is a ranking of everything I saw before, after or during the festival. (Sundance's decision to continue to offer a streaming portal during the festival's final weekend is a great way to play catch-up.) Links lead to individual reviews.
28. The Gallerist
27. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
26. See You When I See You
25. Run Amok
24. I Want Your Sex
23. Zi
22. Chasing Summer
21. Union County
20. The Invite
19. Time and Water
18. Sentient
17. Buddy
16. Broken English
15. The Shitheads
14. The Oldest Person in the World
13. Leviticus
12. Filipinana
11. One in a Million
10. The History of Concrete
9. Nuisance Bear
8. The Weight
7. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
6. Closure
5. Carousel
4. If I Go Will They Miss Me
3. Josephine
2. The Friend’s House Is Here
1. Once Upon a Time in Harlem
I am not the first person to note that the best film at this year's Sundance was made in 1972. David Greaves' Once Upon a Time in Harlem, built from footage shot by his father William 54 years ago, immediately joins the ranks of other recent documentaries like Summer of Soul and Amazing Grace that were believed to be lost to time. It's a revelation, narrowly edging out Maryam Ataei and Hossein Keshavarz's graceful, slyly subversive Tehran-set drama The Friend's House Is Here. I'm pretty high on my Top Five in particular, and look forward to seeing how they're received in the wider world. (Even in Park City, writer-director Rachel Lambert's prickly romantic drama Carousel was divisive. I expect a similar response going forward, although I contend it's a gem.)
Thanks for reading. If you'd like to hear me talking about the festival, I appeared on the Film Comment podcast not once but twice. I returned to Nicolas Rapold's The Last Thing I Saw. And before the festival started, I was invited to join Screen Rant senior film critic Gregory Nussen to discuss what Sundance film is the greatest ever. (I'm very happy with my choice.) On to the next one.
I wasn't intending to feature Pete Seeger in back-to-back Friday Videos. But then I rewatched Bugonia.
Before I left for Park City, Screen Rant invited me to join their senior film critic Gregory Nussen for a podcast episode in which we each made our choice for the greatest Sundance movie ever. What did "greatest" mean? That was left to us to determine. Gregory went with Sex, Lies, and Videotape. I went with Hoop Dreams. Below, we talk about our picks. Hope you enjoy.
A$AP Rocky had a good 2025 on the big-screen, nailing key roles in both If I Had Legs I'd Kick You and Highest 2 Lowest. But let's not forget what a good rapper he is.
