2025 - The Year We Almost Called it a Day!
Dec 16, 2025
Hey,
I hope you’re doing well. It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m working in the studio with Ben and Sef. Since they’re now “cleaning tracks” from what we recorded all day and last night, I decided to grasp the very same vibe and spirit that is in this incredible room of ours to share parts of what happened in our world last week!
To me, and to the entire team as well, new music release weeks are always something really intense on every possible level! A beautiful poetic mixture of stress, anxiety, excitement, a lot of work, and mutual challenges, making sure we haven’t forgotten anything!
But what a week this has been…! My favorite of the year, I think! :) It’s the very first time we reach the sell-out threshold within The Club during the 48h presale window! The idea of releasing City on Fire was to celebrate this beautiful thing we call “us”, and reaching this long-dreamed-of objective has been quite a celebration at the HQ since Friday 10am!
In other words: Thank you so very much!!!!!!!
🎧 What I’m listening to
Postcards album Ripe from Ruptured Records.
This album came out on March 28th and has been close to me ever since. We had the chance to share the stage with these incredible and truly inspiring folks a few times, and they really are as human, as nice and as amazing as their music is.
They’re a band from Beirut, Lebanon, so as you understand, their life is anything but easy. They have to be really creative and engaged toward one another, toward their art and their project to simply gather, rehearse, record and especially when it comes to touring.
Their story, their humanity as well as their music truly impacted us all in so many ways…! Hope you’ll enjoy it!
📖 Reading highlight I’m pondering
Alex’s Substack entry called Bocholt: The End Is Beginning… I’m Shining Now, shared on December 4th. (read here)
To me, this particular and precise Substack entry is above and beyond any reflections shared all year long as it feels like a serious and real-life threshold. After a year spent confronting the weight of years that felt like they had been wasted, memory, fragility, and resilience, this text arrives as a moment of quiet and powerful illumination, where something capital in Alex’s journey finally releases.
Throughout the past year, Alex has been writing his way toward freedom, dismantling inherited fears, revisiting old narratives, and learning how to inhabit the present without the old armor which had become rusted with time, throughout raging storms and what seemed like eternal winters. Bocholt captures that fragile instant when endurance toward what seemed impossible gives way to acceptance, especially when survival transforms into radiance. It’s not about closure, but about personal permission, permission to begin again without erasing what came before, but also and especially being proud of what this journey has been.
This entry is crucial to me because it doesn’t only celebrate arrival; it honors becoming. It reminds me that freedom isn’t a destination, but a lifestyle, one rooted in honesty, faith, and the courage to let the light exist alongside the deep scars that defined us for way too long.
When Alex titled the opening track of his album Windows in the Sky The Beginning Is the End back in 2020, it felt like a quiet prophecy, a sentence written before its meaning could fully be lived. At the time, it spoke of survival, of standing at the edge of something unnamed, of learning how to breathe while carrying the weight of what had already been lost.
This is why the Bocholt entry matters so deeply: it completes a circle that began with Windows in the Sky. It shows us that becoming free is not about escaping pain, but about walking through it long enough for meaning to emerge. In that sense, Alex offers more than words; he invites us to recognize our own thresholds, and to trust that even at the end of something, a beginning is already shining.
🎧 Podcast of the Year
Transmissions from Aquarium Drunkard
As I really like to start my day running and listening to a podcast, this one has been following me in the streets of so many cities around the world throughout the year! It was a hard one for me to choose, as I like so many of those, but knowing how much of a music community this Club is all about, I had to share one of my great sources of inspiration!
📸 My Picture of the Year
Alex and I at his management’s New York City office, taken on April 15th
To me, since 2025 has been such a powerful year on so many levels, personal ones, artistic ones, professional ones but mainly, cultural ones for our band and label, there truly is a before and after this wonderful picture. For us to travel to New York to hang out with Alex’s managers for a few days really changed everything for us. We wouldn’t be where we are right now if it weren't for these incredible people! This picture will live on forever with me, as it really represents what it truly means to live intentionally!
As Alex shared on his Facebook at that time:
In fact, as you might have noticed, having found my people, like I am so happy to say ever since I met my managers, has been as fulfilling as liberating for me, and I’m humbly taking pride in stating that it had a tremendous effect on me. To know I belong beyond the steep walls of my self-imposed isolation is a new emancipative sentiment that is highly significant for me. It leads me to open the shutters for others to see me, to unlock the otherwise bolted door to welcome anyone willing to take another chance at meeting me after so many unfruitful attempts… That’s a figure of speech, but you know what I mean. It’s not easy for me, and I greatly suffered because of that. It’s an evolving process.
Read more here.
💬 Shared in the Long Shadows Chat this week
The unique, the beauty, the community and the friendly soul and spirit of Tangier as Alex is back where this artistic and personal journey of his started back in 2016. We started 2025 in Tangier and as we’re getting toward the end of it, it’s just so amazing to read Alex’s chats about how excited and happy everyone is in our neighborhood, amongst our friends there, as they’re gathered together again after a few months that felt like years.
Alex being in a completely different area in his heart and mind truly enlightens these encounters at the right level, and we can feel it almost as if we were there…! As you know we’re all in a 10k steps a day chat group as well, and as Alex goes out to achieve his daily steps goals, he has to stop at so many places to meet and greet friends and since so many of them have the same names around Mohammed, Yassine, Ayoub, Hassan etc, they all have lovely nicknames now, making it easy for us in the chat to understand who Alex is talking about.
So we have the mustache guy selling spices, the non-mustache guy selling spices, the low-voice guy selling clothes, the high-pitch guy selling clothes, the El Minzah tall security guy, the El Minzah normal-size security guy, the El Minzah mustache security guy, and so on…!
Also, many new dogs joined Alex’s dogs’ family party! He simply loves to walk around and pet them, feed them and of course, give them names! Names like Le boucher de Nantes (always being in line at the butcher station), Blanche (complete white female dog), Jappy (which means barking in French, as this one barks easily), and so on!
It’s just so peaceful, beautiful and inspiring to read Alex being at home but above all, being lighthearted, aligned with himself, and truly eager to experience how Tangier will impact his writings and lyrics for the next album…!
I have one more missive for you next week, my 50th this year, after which I’ll take 2 weeks off and dive right back in mid-January!
Let’s be great to one another!
Your friend and Chief Operator,
Jeff
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