The J500

So back in 2008 or 2009, a good friend planted a seed by mentioning to me this pet project of his where he generated a list of his current 500 favourite songs and updated it annually. I like music. I like ranking things and I like making lists. Sometimes the longer the better. I thought about how I would go about creating something like this but kind of make it my own. In the end, I decided to make a list of the songs that have meant the most to me over time. This could be interpreted as the songs that I've liked the most, the ones that have been tied to the some of my most significant moments or (for the lucky ones) a fusion of the two. I like to think of it (morbidly) as a list that could be played at my funeral to give people an overall sense of the essential songs of my life.

It took a while to get that first list together: scouring through my collection (digital, CD and cassette!), going through old music charts to cover the top 40 obsession years and wracking my brain to fill in the gaps was a fairly involved process. The Internet was extremely useful, as was taking suggestions from friends and family. Ranking the songs was another chore altogether. I would never have been happy just leaving it as some alphabetically-ordered list, but it became hard to figure out things like whether the first dance song at my wedding would be higher on the list than that song I couldn't stop listening to that one summer or the first pop song that my kids and I both liked or the song I first liked enough to go out and pick up the album. I gave it my best shot and have tried to stay on top of it by updating it every two years to incorporate new songs that should be added to the list.

There are very few rules for eligibility:

• Generally speaking, I'm starting the eligibility period with 1990, when I first started loving songs and buying my own music.  There are some songs that predate 1990, but they are almost all tied to events occurring in 1990 or after or being songs that I discovered/rediscovered in a serious way after that time.
• I have to be able to still want to listen to each song on the list.  This wasn't originally a rule, but I found that I'd get the earlier versions of the list together, but then I wouldn't be able to fully enjoy it as there were songs that I'd want to skip.  So maybe this affects the purity of the list, but I just had to be able to throw it on shuffle and know that I'd be ok with whatever came up.  NOTE: this rule is in no way an attempt to eradicate embarrassing entires from the list.  Jude Cole, Nelson and Deep Forest should back that up.  I have to say though that a song's position on the list is definitely influenced by longevity - it will take some time for songs from the past five years to mean as much to me writ large as favourite songs from the 90s that I've never grown tired of.
• Ummm, I think that's actually it.  The idea of disallowing seasonal music was brought up, but I don't think there were any applicable tracks that would have cracked the list anyway.

In the end, there were a few things that I'm still a bit bummed about.  I love jazz music, but the genre itself is pretty much nowhere to be found here.  I realized that there were very few songs that I couldn't get enough of and that it was more jazz albums that I loved...and this didn't really fit the methodology.  Same with some other albums that I listened to throughout my university years (primarily as study music) where none of the actual tracks stood up to the others on this list.  So shouts out to the Joshua Redman canon, Ella Fitzgerald, Vince Guaraldi, Astrud Gilberto, To Rococo Rot, 1 Giant Leap, Sade and Kruder & Dorfmeister - none of you are anywhere to be found here.

So that's about all there is to be said about my funeral list.  There's a lot of good music on it.  And a lot of music most would consider bad (I'll just file it under "guilty pleasure").  There's a lot of very popular music and a few songs that most people wouldn't have ever heard of.  The selected songs are a little all over the map and I'm pretty happy it turned out that way.  Through the magic of YouTube, I've constructed video playlists of the whole thing so you can flip through the tracks at your leisure.  Over time, I suspect that some videos will be pulled down (particularly those by Prince - that dude does NOT like his work in the public domain) so I'll have to keep an eye on that.  This version was finalized last week so it's set in stone for another couple of years.

With these playlists, the first number is the rank of the first song of the list and the second number is the rank of the last song.  So the playlists are arranged like a countdown.

• J500-J401 (Note that Prince and the New Power Generation's "7" (my #495 song) is nowhere to be found on YouTube)
• J400-J301
• J300-J201
• J200-J101
• J100-J001

As always, enjoy!