Viking's Choice 2025: The Guitar

All Songs Considered

NPR

Music

4.4 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 December 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

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Summary

On the last episode of All Songs Considered for 2025, NPR Music producer Lars Gotrich takes host Robin Hilton through an exceptional year in guitar music. From Gwenifer Raymond's beautiful and brash fingerstyle to Rafael Toral's stretched-out jazz standards, not to mention William Tyler's glitched hymns and Vernon Reid's ecstatic shred, there's so much diversity to be found in six strings.

Featured songs and artists:
• Gwenifer Raymond: "Bleak Night in Rabbit's Wood," from 'Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark'

• Hayden Pedigo: "Houndstooth," from 'I'll Be Waving As You Drive Away'

• TAKAAT: "Isghmar," from 'Is Noise, Vol. 1'

• Rafael Toral: "You Don't Know What Love Is," from 'Traveling Light'

• Laura Snowden: "This Changing Sky," from 'This Changing Sky'

• Madala Kunene & Sibusile Xaba: "Wemfana," from 'kwaNTU'

• William Tyler: "Star of Hope," from 'Time Indefinite'

• Jorge Espinal: "ají de pollería," from 'Bombos y Cencerros'

• Vernon Reid: "Meditation on the Last Time I Saw Arthur Rhames," from 'Hoodoo Telemetry'

Want more? See the full Viking's Choice list for the best guitar music of 2025.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What is this? Oh, this is the holiday script. I mean, yeah, hey, let's do it. All right. Phone rings. It's me.
0:07.1	Go. Robin Hilton. Hey, are you almost ready? I'm pulling up soon. I'm based on my turkeys.
0:14.6	Okay. That's not it. That's not the line. Okay. You can't do this show. You're fired.
0:38.2	I'm sorry, Lars. Merry Christmas. You're not fired. Let's do a show. It's All Songs Considered. I'm Robin Hilton. Lars Gottrich here. Ooh, it's me. Editor of the Tiny Desk series. That's right. Yeah. You pop up from time to time on the show here throughout the year.
0:44.7	I mean, do a little thing called a Vikings Choice as well. Yeah, a recurring series. You are the creator and curator of the Vikings Choice series where you highlight all of the, well, I'm just
0:52.1	going to call it the wild and weird and wonderful music that you
0:55.4	discover throughout any given year. The misshapen misfits of music. You're the king on the island
1:02.3	of misfit toys. Yes. And it's something I've always loved about you, Lars. I mean, I think
1:08.2	you've got maybe the wildest range of musical tastes.
1:11.0	If anybody I've ever known, you're the only one I've ever known who could listen to just the screamiest, loudest, just thrashiest metal, and then go right from that to some like really sweet Christian contemporary pop song. I did bring six pence none the richer to the tiny desk you did and it was beautiful it was our
1:27.7	great holiday show that's up now people haven't checked that out well we close every year with a
1:32.4	special viking's choice retrospective and uh that's what we're doing on this episode of all songs
1:37.4	consider you usually pick a theme i think last year's was music for catharsis and calm yeah what is it
1:43.8	this year the guitar guitar. The guitar.
1:47.4	Or it really is how you say it. Or the guitar. Or the guitar. Yeah. With the guitar. And it really is a range
1:53.5	of stuff that you brought here. From the sweet to, well, it's actually all pretty beautiful stuff,
1:58.4	I think. I think so. I just noticed I was, you know, I like to put it together like a theme that kind of ties everything together.
2:06.3	And I couldn't help but notice that it was, 2025 was just a great year for the guitar.
2:12.0	And not just rock music, not just the finger style, American primitive kind of stuff, but all the stuff that was
2:19.6	kind of in between, classic guitar, jazz, ambient, but all using my personal favorite instrument,
2:27.9	the instrument that I've been playing since I was 12 years old. What do you want to start with?
2:32.0	I think we got to start with my album of the year.
	...

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