All of This and Nothing: An Introduction

I've been posting one song every Monday for three years now; I suppose it's now a tradition of the blog.

The series for 2023 was This Year, inspired by something John Scalzi did in a single post the end of the year before: one song for each year of my life, each by a different artist, each song somehow important to me. I followed that up with Portions for Foxes in 2024, which was all women: solo artists and women-led bands, to try to make up for what was a bit of a sausage-fest the first year. Last year was Better Things, which continued to follow the only-different-artists paradigm, with largely songs I'd considered for the first two years but didn't manage to fit in.

Each yearly series, as you might be able to guess, had a title song - one that wasn't part of the general schema, but was thematically important in some way, or (maybe more accurately) was a way for me to cram one more song in when the choosing got difficult. 

I wanted to keep going in 2026, and keep the only-different-artists thing going for one more year. So I ran through a few ideas - first Instrumentals (not enough different artists, and I'd want to showcase weird songs by people I already listed anyway). I thought about cover songs, which had the same issue - a fair list wouldn't be all different artists.

Then I toyed with a series of "Second Songs" - the other songs by bands I've already featured once. And that might come up next year.

But, instead, I ended up going with a double theme, or a theme that is two sides of the same coin. With a lot of the songs in the back half of 2025, I found myself musing about which ones were famous and which ones were obscure - and sometimes wondering why that happened for a particular song, or if, maybe, something I thought was obscure was actually well-known.

So this year will alternate - obscure songs with famous ones, back and forth through the weeks of the year.

And the title song - which is not part of the series, but defines it in some odd, indescribable way, is another obscure one (of course), The Psychedelic Furs with a sad, lamenting look back at something completely broken: All of This and Nothing. The Furs themselves are not obscure - I hope, even this many years later - but this song is, which I guess makes it right as the exemplar song for this year's series.