Revisiting 2025 and looking ahead to 2026
A recap of 2025, a busy but somewhat unfulfilling year at Joy in the Journey, and a look ahead to what's coming in 2026.
Howdy fellow MusicStackers!! I decided to spend some time over the holiday season being intentional about where I wanted to take Joy in the Journey in 2026. In doing so, I decided to take stock of what I’d accomplished over the past year and to evaluate what brought me joy and what didn’t.
On a personal basis, 2025 was a big year for me and my wife Tina. After ringing in the new year in a log cabin in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, we flew to London, collected the pieces of luggage we’d had in storage for the six months since retiring in June to spend the rest of the year hiking, and made our way north. We set up base for six weeks at an Airbnb in Kendal, a market town on the southern edge of the Lake District National Park in Cumbria and only 30 miles from the edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Over the course of nine days of house hunting we managed to see eighteen properties. The seventeenth property, Hatters Cottage in a tiny hamlet of 12 properties in the Yorkshire Dales, stole our hearts and we made an offer less than six hours later. After a couple days of negotiating, we managed to come to a mutually satisfactory agreement with the vendor and handed everything over to the lawyers and the property surveyor.
Over the course of the following month we managed to find furniture for the living room and bedrooms with a lead time that worked well with the completion date of our purchase. Then it was off to the Canary Islands for five weeks of hiking before returning to England at the end of March to “begin our new lives”. April was a whirlwind of researching and purchasing furniture and decor as well as buying a car—our first ever! It was an expensive couple months!! We managed to get some good long distance walking in over the remainder of the year—Hadrian’s Wall in May with my best friend, the Cleveland Way in September and the Outer Hebrides in Scotland in October—while also beginning to discover the walks in our local area.
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Against that backdrop, I also somehow managed to publish 96 Substack posts in 2025!
In January I wrapped up my 2024 AOTY posts with my top ten albums of the year.
At the beginning of February, I launched the monthly New Music Sampler series in which I offered up a dozen or so of my favourite albums from the prior month.
I also launched my first “musical game” series in February with Lost in Translation, which ran for twenty instalments. This was a fun but time-consuming series which involved running a song lyric through six different language translations and then back into English to see if people could identify the original song. I’d often have to run through 25 or 30 song lyrics before finding one that came back garbled enough to challenge my readers and it ended up being way too much work.
At the end of July, after wrapping up Lost in Translation, I announced my second musical game series of the year, Word(Play)List, which ran for thirteen instalments through the end of the year and gained a small but loyal following.
I also ran the short-lived Five Faves series at the beginning of the year before we moved into the new house and life became too busy:
The final installment was by far my favourite, a deep dive into five of my favorite dancehall reggae songs from the 1980s. Given the amount of research I did, and how long it took me to pull it together, it’s one of the pieces of writing that I’m most proud of. If dancehall reggae is your thing, please check it out:
Even if dancehall reggae isn’t your thing, I’d highly recommend spending the eight minutes to watch this video on the creation of the “Sleng Teng Riddim”, one of the most famous and influential reggae instrumentals ever. If you only have a couple minutes, start at the 5:40 mark and hear how this instrumental came to life from a Casio MT-40 synth “rock preset”, which itself came from Eddie Cochran by way of David Bowie. It’s magical!!
As the year came to a close, I wrapped up a busy year by presenting my fifty favourite albums of 2025 spread across three posts. This was the first time I’d ever done any real music criticism or album “reviews” per se and although I found myself stretched creatively, it was a rewarding experience. In case you missed any of these, you can find them here:
Please feel free to share the “Joy” with anyone else you know that loves music!
Because, after all, sharing is caring, right?
As I revisited my 2025 Substack activity last week, I had to acknowledge that I’d moved away from one of my original hopes for this publication, which was to write about music that I love and has impacted my life in some important way. While I had fun with the Word(Play)List series, writing about ten songs each week that shared some musical connection, these weren’t songs I’d otherwise write about. I also found that although I had plenty of ideas—dozens in fact—sitting in my Substack notebooks on Evernote, I seemed to have lost a bit of the focus and the excitement to keep going.
I decided to go back to basics and do some one-man brainstorming to see if I could come up with a plan for 2026 that would keep me active on Substack in a way that brings me more joy. Read on to hear what I came up with!
Although I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions—they tend to set me up more for failure rather than success—I do approach the end of each year and the start of a new one with a view to where and how I can and want to improve over the next twelve months. This often involves building new practices and habits in a way that’s manageable and sustainable. I used to do the resolutions thing where I’d say “Starting on Monday January 5th, I’m gonna start eating right, meditating and journaling every morning, going to the gym five days a week, walking 20 miles a week, drinking two litres of water a day, reading for 30 minutes a day” etc., etc., etc. ad infinitum. Setting such unrealistic expectations usually left me in the situation of falling short at the beginning of the year (i.e., I’d manage to stick with only 2 or 3 of the 7 or 8 resolutions). Instead of dialling back my expectations for myself, I’d just kinda forget about ALL my new goals and revert to living life unintentionally.
In 2020 I decided to change my approach and moved to what I call habit stacking. This is NOT the habit stacking popularized by James Clear in his book Atomic Habits—a book I still really want to read (I haven’t forgotten Andy!!)—it’s the idea of introducing 2 or 3 new behaviours each year, but doing so in a staggered manner. When I decided that I wanted to begin a daily meditation and journaling practice, I waited until I’d successfully built a fledgling meditation habit (two or three weeks) before introducing the daily journaling. The result has been the successfully adoption and maintenance of two long-term habits (I’ve missed a total of fifteen meditations and six journaling sessions in six years). I also have an app that helps me keep track of my habit streaks. As an example, when I see that I’m at 22 days in a row of drinking at least a litre of water, it encourages me to get my water in today so I don’t break my streak.
As I reviewed 2025 and looked ahead to 2026, I decided to make a commitment to a daily writing practice—primarily Substack-related—in which I’d spend at least an hour each day writing. Making that commitment forced me to look critically at exactly what I would be writing about every day. That in turn brought me to the realization that, outside of a bunch of random ideas sitting in Evernote, I’d really had no plan for my writing in 2025. Having no plan for my writing really sapped my motivation and made it much harder for me to write consistently. Consequently, I lost a fair bit of the joy that writing on Substack can offer. In an effort to help bring that joy back, I decided to make a proper writing plan for 2026, which involved pulling some of my ideas out of Evernote, formalizing them into a publication schedule, and making a commitment to myself that I’d stick to that schedule. With that done, now, whenever I sit down at my computer to start writing, I’ll have list of posts to work on and an order of priority. I’m sure that’ll keep me more focused and more engaged while also providing the benefit of writing about music that brings me joy.
So let’s get to it! Here’s what’s happening at Joy in the Journey in 2026:
What’s Staying in 2026
Word(Play)List - I’m still having fun with this game series, and it has a loyal following, so it will continue but will now be published twice monthly. New puzzles will arrive on the first and third Monday of the month with the solution post and playlist arriving on the following weekend.
New Music Sampler - Although I felt a little overwhelmed by new music at the end of 2025, I’ll continue to listen to and recommend new music every month. These will be published on the first Sunday of each month, covering 10-15 albums that I enjoyed from the prior month.
What’s New for 2026
My All-Time Favourite Songs - Posts from this series will be published on the second Monday of every month. This post intro gives you an idea of what you can expect:
In the spring of 2021, I was inspired to begin a playlist on Spotify called My All-Time Favourite Songs. I’ve very slowly been adding to the playlist over time, and it now comprises 33 tracks. Each installment of this series, which will be published on the second Monday of each month, will cover a single track, what it means to me, and why I love it.
Desert Island Discs - Posts from this series will be published on the fourth Monday of the month, eight times in 2026. This post intro gives you an idea of what you can expect:
The radio show Desert Island Discs, which initially premiered on BBC Forces Radio on January 29, 1942, asks each “castaway” to select eight audio recordings—among other items—that they would choose to take if cast away on a desert island. In keeping with the spirit of the radio show but expanding the definition of “audio recording” to entire albums, my Desert Island Discs series will comprise eight episodes. In each episode I’ll review the album, when and how I discovered it, its importance in my life, and which songs I love the most.
The Best Music You’ve Never Heard - this is a daily Notes series highlighting songs from “The Rough Trade Guide to the Best Music You’ve Never Heard”, a 2008 book by Nigel Williamson with additional material by David Smyth and Robert Webb. Every day I’ll be posting a new Note with a video of one of the songs mentioned in the book along with a little backstory. The post announcing the series is now pinned to the top of my homepage and will be updated with a link to every new Note I publish.
Other series and essays - I do have ideas fleshed out for a couple additional series and for some long-form essays. I don’t want to commit to anything, but there will hopefully be some additional 2026 posts that don’t fall into any of the above categories.
Activity on Notes - in addition to my daily series, I’m also hoping to be more active on Notes, both in terms of reading other people’s Notes, and promoting my own posts and those of others through restacking.
I’m excited to see what 2026 brings, in life, in writing, in hiking, and in personal growth. Thank you for choosing to be along for the ride, I appreciate you all!!
Wrapping up on a fun musical note: nobody gonna slow me down in 2026!!
I’m really looking forward to your new content and series, Mark. Desert Island Discs sounds very promising. Have you ever thought about turning it into a collaboration, inviting other writers to share the records and things they’d take with them? It feels like there could be a great new format in there.
Looking forward to reading all your writing.
Me, I just read everyone and occasionally post a picture or album that I like.