There is a particular kind of bravery in making an instrumental album in 2025. Not the obvious bravery, like “I am challenging the listener” or “this is a bold artistic statement,” but the quieter, more dangerous kind: the willingness to trust that people will sit still long enough to let the music explain itself. Hearty Breakfast, Sensible Dinner, Mike Goodspeed’s fourth full-length release, is built entirely on that faith. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t sell itself with hooks or choruses. It just… keeps talking, calmly and insistently, until you realize you’ve been listening much longer than you planned to.
Mike Goodspeed is a Massachusetts-based bassist, and the word bassist here does a lot of work. This isn’t bass as support. This is bass as protagonist. Throughout the album, the instrument is asked to do things it is usually politely discouraged from doing: carry melody, set emotional tone and occasionally behave like it has something deeply important to say. The result is an album that feels less like a collection of tracks and more like a series of small rooms you wander through, each with its own strange acoustic logic.
The title, Hearty Breakfast, Sensible Dinner, sounds like a joke until you realize it isn’t. It’s a perfect metaphor for how the record behaves. The early tracks are generous, exploratory, almost indulgent in their harmonic curiosity. Later, things become leaner, more reflective, as if the album itself is gradually realizing that excess and restraint can coexist without canceling each other out.
“Uncertainty” and “Timeline of the Far Future” immediately establish the album’s emotional grammar. These pieces sit somewhere between folk and musique concrète; music that feels handmade but also oddly abstracted. The bass doesn’t just play notes; it sketches shapes. There’s a sense of wandering here, of ideas being tested and discarded, which gives the tracks a fragile, provisional beauty. They don’t resolve so much as they gently stop, like a thought that trails off because it doesn’t yet know where it’s going.
Then there’s “Coming to Getcha,” which jolts the album into motion. Suddenly, we’re in funk territory; lean, rhythmic, and lightly mischievous. It’s Nile Rodgers-adjacent, but only in the sense that it understands groove as a kind of conversation. The bass locks into a tight, playful pattern, while the drums which are performed by Jesse Stiglich give the track a live-wire energy that feels almost rebellious after the album’s earlier restraint. It’s not flashy. It’s confident. And confidence, in instrumental music, goes a long way.
“I Don’t Remember” shifts the emotional temperature again. It’s cinematic, but not in the bombastic, soundtrack sense. This is small-scale drama: slow harmonic movement, careful pacing, and a melody that feels like it’s trying to remember something important but keeps losing the thread. There’s a melancholy here that doesn’t demand your attention; it just sits beside you, quietly, until you notice it.
As a final shoutout of highlight tracks, “Duly Noted” featuring Brazilian drummer Alessandro Moleta might be the album’s strangest and most compelling moment. It has the restless, layered energy of a Black Country, New Road instrumental, but filtered through Goodspeed’s very specific musical worldview. The track builds itself out of overlapping textures rather than traditional structure, creating a sense of forward motion without ever quite settling into a groove. It feels like watching a city assemble itself in real time.
What makes Hearty Breakfast, Sensible Dinner work is not just its technical skill, but its refusal to behave like background music. Instrumental albums are often treated as something you put on while doing something else and this one resists that. It keeps nudging you back into active listening. The bass lines don’t loop lazily; they evolve. The arrangements don’t repeat themselves; they develop arguments, propose counterarguments, and then move on.
The fact that Goodspeed performed and produced almost the entire album himself gives it a strange intimacy. You can hear the decisions being made. You can hear the moments where something could have been smoothed over but wasn’t. The record doesn’t feel polished so much as considered. It knows what it wants to be, and it doesn’t apologize for it.
Hearty Breakfast, Sensible Dinner is an album built around instruments that usually live in the background, making music that refuses to be relegated to the background. It doesn’t chase trends or try to be relevant. It simply insists that there is still room for curiosity, for patience, and for instrumental music that trusts its audience to meet it halfway.
In a musical landscape increasingly dominated by immediacy and optimization, Hearty Breakfast, Sensible Dinner feels almost subversive in its steadiness. It asks you to listen. And if you do, it rewards you with something rare: the sense that you’ve been part of a conversation rather than a transaction.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
