All-Time Favorite Songs

I've been working on compiling a list of my favorite songs of all time. Eventually, I want to be able to condense it to 20, and from there, to a top 10. I've made a CD of some of them, Volume 1 of my faves. Here's what made it to Vol. 1:

1. Masterfade - Andrew Bird
2. Intervention - Arcade Fire
3. God Only Knows - The Beach Boys
4. Shiver - Coldplay
5. Certain Things You Ought To Know - Destroyer
6. Keep It Together - Guster
7. The Moment I Said It - Imogen Heap
8. Schindler's List theme - Itzhak Perlman
9. Lover, You Should've Come Over - Jeff Buckley
10. Maple Leaves (7" Version) - Jens Lekman
11. River- Joni Mitchell
12. Star Witness - Neko Case
13. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel
14. On Your Side - Pete Yorn
15. Let Down - Radiohead
16. Across The Universe (Beatles cover) - Rufus Wainwright
17. The Only Living Boy in New York - Simon and Garfunkel
18. Black Like Me - Spoon

So there's the first disc o' faves. More contenders:

Here, There and Everywhere - The Beatles
I Want You Back - Jackson 5
Ain't No Mountain High Enough - Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell
Tuesday Afternoon - The Moody Blues
Layla - Derek and the Dominoes
Come Pick Me Up - Ryan Adams
Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen
Walking on Broken Glass - Annie Lennox
Heartbeats - The Knife
Here Comes The Summer - Fiery Furnaces
Grace's Amazing Hands - Dave Barnes
Daft Punk is Playing at My House - LCD Soundsystem
Pull Shapes - The Pipettes
What Else Is There? - Royksopp
Trill - Clipse
What You Know - T.I.

And, of course, my favorite artists appear more than once:

Jeff Buckley - Lover...(Vol. 1), Hallelujah, Last Goodbye
Coldplay - Shiver (Vol. 1), Yellow, Swallowed in the Sea
Neko Case - Star Witness (Vol. 1), Runnin' Out Of Fools
The Beatles - Here, There and Everywhere, Yesterday, In My Life
Radiohead - Let Down (Vol. 1), There There, How To Disappear Completely, Black Star, I Might Be Wrong, True Love Waits, All I Need

But I'm not sure what to do about these yet. It seems redundant to put multiple songs by the same artist. Especially for Radiohead. I don't really need to include all of my favorite Radiohead songs on this list, because Radiohead is just my favorite artist, period. I'll pick two more after Let Down to put on Vols. 2 and 3, but probably only Let Down will appear in the top 20.

So. There it is. Songs from different genres, years, etc. What all of them have in common:

1. Each song is attached to a certain memory, a certain feeling. Many of them have nostalgic value for me. And to most of them I've attached some sort of emotional importance. For example...

Shiver = my anthem to all my high school crushes
...and there are more explanations that are too private to put on a public blog.

2. They are all incredibly comforting to me. Either by making me happy or making me sad, which are both, in their own ways, comforting. For example...

Lover, You Should've Come Over = my go-to crying session song. I'm sad/angry/frustrated/overwhelmed-->Buckley's my man. A perfect song to accompany necessary, long-overdue release of emotion. Also great for this purpose are River, The Moment I Said It, and Black Like Me.

On the flip side, Masterfade, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, Across The Universe, Keep It Together, Only Living Boy In New York...are songs that comfort me by making me feel safe and happy and peaceful. This is just as important as the sad songs. But I couldn't really live without the happy ones, or without the sad ones. I need both. They balance each other out.


The construction of this list, in itself, has been a comfort to me. I essentially would not be able to function without these songs.

...which brings me to this: I'd like to draw attention to the title of this blog: "All-Time FAVORITE Songs." Not "All-Time BEST Songs." This is not a list of objectively great songs throughout history or anything. It's strictly personal, which means that it's tres, tres subjective. These are my PERSONAL favorites. And the ones that mean the most are the ones whose greatness are probably lost on most "seasoned" music lovers/critics. I like songs because of what they mean to me, to my life, personally. I'm not going to put a song on here just because it was "historically important." And I'm not going to feel bad about excluding certain genres, eras, decades, movements, artists, etc. Fuck that. I'm not a music critic. I'm not writing a fucking article for Rolling Stone titled "The 20 Greatest Rock & Roll Songs Of The Past 50 Years" or some shit like that. Because I don't care about that. I just don't. But I do care about the songs that have kept me company this year, last year, 10 years ago. That's what I care about. Hence, that's what I write about.

So I hope that if anyone reads this, maybe that person will get a better idea of who I am, based on my all-time favorite music. And even if no one reads it, I, at least, learned something about myself in compiling this list. So I feel pretty good about that.

C'est tout.