This project began as a "What are your top ten all-time songs" back in 2006. Its the kind of thing you discuss with friends and really don’t take that seriously. Except for me it became a kind of growing obsession—within a year it expanded to be a top 100 list. Off and on I returned to the list as it brought a strange since of satisfaction each time I worked on it. Sometimes months would roll by before I gave it any thought at all then the search would start up again. By 2013 it had expanded to a top 200. This made it easier to handle the pile up of overflow songs that almost made the cut. In 2016 the list morphed to an even 500 songs. Getting to a settled list was elusive but never lost its grip on my imagination. After many late nights and many hours of tracking down songs the final list synthesized with something solid, something complete. This was on Halloween morning 2022.
Probably as some sort of device to sort things out in my mind. I've been making lists of all kinds of the things at least since Jr. High.
Since I’m not a musician or music critic merely a lifetime fan most of my rankings were determined by the emotion the songs stirred when I heard them. Especially important was the reaction I get when they randomly came on, as in a restaurant, restroom or grocery store. Yes, I have heard Stairway to Heaven in a grocery store and Allison (by Elvis, the other one) in a rest room. Emotion is not so easy to measure so I tried creating a rubric to solve conflict when it was difficult to figure out if a song was just super nostalgic or truly great. I also considered how many times I had heard the song and how long I loved it. In time the rubric expanded so much that it got out of control with so many sections and intellectual judgements it felt wrong so it was abandoned. It was just too cold and sterile.
So after hundreds of hours of watching videos (some truly cringe worthy) and buying digital tracks the list began to make sense. The earliest songs I remember were Beatles songs from the cartoon series I watched in Kindergarten. Next would be The Carpenters Rainy Days and Mondays and Harry Chapin's Cat’s in The Cradle. This last song was one of my first 45 records. Listing to it made me super sad but that just made me like it more. Since I keep an ear on new music, even as I get older, some songs are more recent but for the most part I left off the last 5 to 10 years since it’s hard to tell if they are flash-in-the pans or real keepers. Only a few rare recent (or somewhat recent) tracks made it in.