100 songs to get to know me

13 Oct, 2024

I posted this image over on the bluesky, and it got like 100 likes, so now here we are. Rather than spam this as a 100 post thread, let's do it in a format which is suited for it: the blog.

These songs are in no particular order, except the order I am finding them in my playlists and deciding to put them on here.

1. ABBA - Lay All Your Love On Me

I genuinely don't quite know if my enjoyment of ABBA is something I came by honestly, or something which is simply genetically engineered into my Scandinavian soul. I remember hearing my mom blasting their songs on the home stereo in my childhood, and the association has put permanent nostalgia blinders on me for all of ABBA's greatest hits. Still, I think the beat is undeniable and the mournful tone of the chorus adds some real melancholy to the dramatic plea at the core of the song.

2. Afenginn - Oestrogenmanipuleret Basilisk

Afenginn describe themselves as "bastard etno-punk" which is probably as good a description as you're going to get. There's a lot of klezmer and eastern European folk influences here, but what is more important about Afenginn's best songs is that they go hard as f*ck and it's an absolute blast to dance to them at a show. They played this the first time I saw them live, and the rhythm comes back every time I hear it again. Good times!

3. Afenginn - Ralli in D Minor

With 100 slots to fill, I am giving myself permission to allocate two slots to Afenginn, and for the same reason. Ralli in D Minor is less of a dance tune to me, and more of a headbanger, but with a sufficiently loud subwoofer and a game crowd, you could f*ing mosh to this.

4. Anamanaguchi - Prom Night

I discovered Anamanaguchi as the composers of the title track to the Nerdist podcast back in the day, and being unfamiliar with the concept of chiptunes, I was drawn in initially by the sheer novelty of hearing the squeaks and bloops of my gaming childhood employed towards rock tunes and combined with "real" instruments.

Beyond the gimmick, though, Anamanaguchi won me over fully with the Scott Pilgrim game soundtrack, and then 2013's Endless Fantasy, where the gimmick of chiptune nostalgia noise (at least for me) finally coalesced into something that felt entirely like its own thing. Plus I'm a sucker for exactly this kind of bright dance pop, and Bianca Raquel's vocals here are a perfect match for the tone of the music.

5. Jennifer Hudson - Memory

2019s Cats is a fascinating fucking disaster. Tom Hooper is the worst director of musicals in my living memory, the abuse of the VFX staff extended beyond brutal crunch and absurd challenge imposed by a director who had no idea what the hell he was asking them to do all the way into an astonishingly arrogant and condescending joke from Rebel Wilson and James Corden at the expense of workers who were the last people at fault for the disaster that the movie became (look in the fucking mirror, Wilson and Corden, your performances were rancid).

Still, the silver lining of Cats is we got to hear Jennifer Hudson shake the world on its foundations with her rendition of Memory. I don't give a shit what anyone says, this performance is transcendent and no amount of institutional failure can dim its quality.

6. Annette Bjergfeldt - Min Bærende Bjælke

Annette is one of my mother's oldest friends, and a prolific singer-songwriter now turned author. I've been going to her concerts since I was a little child, and while I am absolutely not the target audience for any of it, it has stuck with me as part of my musical vocabulary deep into adulthood.

She has experimented with brass band accompaniment a few times, but for my money, nothing quite comes close to the floating, optimistic vibe of Min Bærende Bjælke. It sounds like a very particular kind of lasting romance, which of course is also what the lyrics are about.

7. Hozier - Blood Upon the Snow

We'll get more than one Hozier song on this list, but Blood Upon the Snow stands out to me as a song which easily transcends the videogame soundtrack promotional tie-in nature of its conception. Bear McCreary's hurdy gurdy and lyrics about surviving through adversity by holding on to existence with your teeth and nails... yeah, it hits with me. There's something real in that.

"The trees deny themselves nothing that makes them grow, no rainfall, no sunshine, no blood upon the snow." Something about that feels real.

8. The Beatles - Something

idk if I really need to write anything about George Harrison's most famous love song that hasn't been written more extensively by a million dad-rock enthusiasts before me.

I will say, this is one of the few songs I listen to regularly that justify the expensive audiophile headphones I invest in. There's a LOT to hear on a good, lossless, original mix of this song, if you're the kind of pervert who gets off to listening to a song a hundred times to focus on different parts of the soundscape. (it's me, I am the pervert)

9. Blink-182 - Adam's Song

I discovered a lot of my music taste as a young man from extremely low-resolution AMVs that my friend used to download off sketchy file-sharing sites. Blink-182 entered my musical lexicon through the one above, specifically, piggybacking off of my teenage love of Dragon Ball.

I never really grokked what the lyrics were actually about, until relistening to the song years later, but something about the minor-key wail of the thing really sat with my angsty teenage soul and has stuck with me ever since. I cannot listen to this song without that music video playing in my head, the song will forever belong to Vegeta.

There's remastered versions of this AMV out there, apparently, but if it's not 144p with tinny audio, it's just not right. That's not what the song is supposed to sound like, not to me.

10. Blink-182 - Miss You

Blink-182 is one of those bands I discovered via anime AMVs and listened to obsessively for a period as a teenager (The Offspring will show up later on this list), and then fell entirely out of touch with for years until discovering much later in life that they did, in fact, keep releasing music. I Miss You from their self-titled 2003 album felt, when I discovered it sometime in the early 2010s, like a much more mature and interesting sound from a band which had gotten stuck associated with my adolescent superpower kung-fu fantasies which I was, at the time, feeling a bit embarrassed about.

The song had a resurgence on TikTok a little while ago as a meme template, which made me listen to the albums again, and rediscover yet again that Blink-182 is, in fact, still putting out albums.

11. The Blue Van - Man Up

The Blue Van is one of those bands I got introduced to by my dad, and it's one of those bands I routinely feel vaguely insane aren't more well known outside of the northern European touring rock scene.

Man Up is a fantastic album, and the lead single goes so goddamn hard, I absolutely defy you not to feel the pump of that opening riff. Like, yeah it's pumped-up cock rock, but god dammit it's the good kind!

12. The Blue Van - Lay Me Down and Die

Sticking with the theme here, Lay Me Down and Die opens quietly, and where the lyrics are this plaintive moan for a peaceful death and quiet passing from the world of troubles, the song itself absolutely explodes into guitar solos and thundering drum parts and high-pitched rock vocals. There's something poetic in that, I think. It's the kind of song I would want played at my funeral.

13. Bo Burnham - Content

Bo Burnham's Inside was utterly unavoidable when it came out, and no f*ing surprise that I specifically related to his claustrophobic pandemic-meditation, endlessly navel-gazing about the ethics of being an Influential Figure and making Content™ in the age of horrors.

The opening number Content keeps striking at me specifically, though, first of all because it's a kind of synth-driven vaguely 80s pop that hits the special part of my soul, but also because... well, sh*t, it just speaks to me. Yes, god dammit, it DOES feel like this to do the job I do a lot.

14. Carly Rae Jepsen - The Loneliest Time

Another Pandemic Pop hit which found its way into my rotation. There's a spacey disco-vibe to this song, and a sense of longing and re-connection that I really dig here. Carly Rae is a bit hit or miss for me, to be quite honest, but with Wainwright (who I've always had a weakness for) as her counterpart here, it comes together really nicely. I love the way their harmonies blend.

15. Chappell Roan - Pink Pony Club

This is a song which is so extremely neither for me, nor speaking to me, nor reflective of any experience I have ever had in my life. But f*k me running, not only can Roan hit those high notes, the sense of starry-eyed queer longing for community present in the lyrics makes the song feel like so much more than just a pop-hit. This feels like light from the history of a hundred thousand people who didn't know that there would be other people just like them out there.

And that does hit me where it hurts good.

16. Charlie Puth - Attention

I sometimes wish I cared about this song for anything other than its absolutely immaculate bass line, but... I just don't. I'm sorry, Charlie Puth, I'm sure your romantic pain is very real to you and this is a powerful strike against a selfish lover you had to deal with, but I literally just want the bass line to thump in my headphones forever. You are, at best, a very well-composed high harmony for the real star of the song.

17. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Fortunate Son

I don't know that I have anything interesting to say about this song. It's just really good, and I always appreciate a bit of class-conscious anti-war sentiment in my rock and roll.

18. Darren Korb - Lament of Orpheus

I never really had that much appreciation for falsetto singing - I tended to find it shrill and kind of annoying, and I had an instinctive discomfort with it.

Turns out that that was rooted in some weirdly embedded Gender Feelings somewhere deep in my psyche that I had never really dealt with. Amazing what being bullied a bit for his singing at a formative age can do to a man.

Anyway, Orpheus's songs in Hades was one of the things that helped me break the barrier of those particular feelings, and Darren Korb's performance opened my ears to a much more attentive appreciation of the discipline that comes with that kind of singing. Plus, the Underworld Mix just goes hard as hell.

19. Nobuo Uematsu - Main Theme of Final Fantasy VII

I remember vividly the mind-expanding amazement I had as a 9 year old seeing Final Fantasy VII combine a sci-fi world with magic and sword-fighting and fantasy influences. It's not something FFVII invented, but it was where I first encountered the idea, and it remains one of those core memories of suddenly realizing that the creative possibilities of art are vastly wider than I had dared to let myself believe.

The soundtrack of the game did something similar to me - and no track did it more than the overworld theme - the main theme of Final Fantasy VII. It is a piece with such distinct movements and moods; it opens with a quietly adventurous timid few steps into a vast and intimidating new world, hopping into minor keys and intimating danger just around the corner. Then it opens up into bright and optimistic openness, a sense of wonder about the world that lies ahead, counterposed with nostalgic tinkling piano notes and a clarinet that sounds like it's singing of home.

And then it takes off, flying into orchestral bombast, timpany and horn section and all, stopping to hold a bit of tension with a slow, plodding and menacing theme that builds up, which finally releases into a huge open breath that wavers between the menacing and magnificent, resolving... into uncertainty and ambiguity, before the song loops around to start again.

It's perfect. It's the perfect theme for the game. It's the whole game in 6 minutes, note for note spelling out the whole sensation of its story.

20. Faye Wong - Eyes on Me

Staying with Final Fantasy, I remember being absolutely blown away by the FMV trailers and cutscenes of Final Fantasy VIII, only to feel intensely let down by the game and its story, which had the temerity to be a stupid romance between stupid teenagers with a stupid amnesia plot, absolutely betraying my loyalty for the franchise.

I wanted more dystopian sci-fi and another villain with a twelve foot katana and a big badass orchestral boss theme, but Final Fantasy VIII kept insisting on warning me that my habit of emotionally closing myself off from friends and loved ones was a bad thing and I should try to open up and be vulnerable instead.

I didn't like that very much. It felt at once like a very personal insult, but also I was very invested that I didn't care at all about anything the story was doing and the whole thing was stupid actually, and anyway the combat system was bad and junctioning sucked, so there. It's a stupid game with a bad story and I don't have to think about it, and I definitely don't have to engage with any of the uncomfortable, painful pangs of recognition I see in Squall Leonhart's behaviour or feelings of alienation.

Anyway, Eyes On Me is a fantastic song, a deeply underrated piece of worldbuilding for the story of FFVIII as a whole, and I keep meaning to write a video essay about it. Look, the fact that Squall and Rinoa end up having a really bad date if you play this song for them during the festival - it's just f*ing brilliant okay! It's so good!

21. Blues Saraceno - Evil Ways

I encountered this song on the Rebel Galaxy soundtrack and I've never been able to get it out of my playlists since.

It's operatic, it's self-important, it's the soundtrack to a thousand self-mythologizing cowboy epics composed in the heads of insufferable teenage boys. I love it to death.

The goddamn church bell. God, how pretentious! (positive)

22. Fleetwood Mac - Dreams

It was that one TikTok, of the guy skateboarding and drinking juice, that finally got me to take a harder listen to Fleetwood Mac, and thank god I did. What a vibe, what an absolutely unmatched vibe. I hope someday that toxic and painful heartbreak will inspire me to make something this petty and beautiful with the people who hurt me.

23. Monkey Wrench - Foo Fighters

I'm hardly the only millennial kid whose music taste in the 2000s became largely defined by whatever happened to included with the latest Guitar Hero. Monkey Wrench became my doorway into the world of 2000s rock music (yes I know it's from '97), and eventually also became the catalyst that got me to go back and listen to Nirvana beyond just Smells Like Teen Spirit.

24. Ghost - Mary on a Cross

Another song I found because of a TikTok meme (positive). Ghost is apparently a band that music snobs love to dunk on, but I find the peculiar mix of English-is-not-my-first-language romantic poetry lyrics, religious imagery and oddly overt horniness to be compelling here. I'm a sucker for the theatricality of it.

25. Go Go Berlin - Castles Made of Sand

Staying with consciously nostalgic retro-rock made by Scandinavians who struggle with their English on occasion, let's put some Go Go Berlin on this list. Castles Made of Sand is a big romantic ode to a relationship that can't last, and I just can't not be charmed by a lyric like "we all die young, we all die young, go easy on me" because, damn. That really is how it f*ing feels a lot of the time.

We all die young.

26. Go Go Berlin - Bad!

Less poetically compelling than Castles Made of Sand, Bad! is much more of a big cocky power anthem designed to pump an audience the hell up and proclaim a masculine peacock power to the world.

It seems to be designed as a kind of thesis statement for the band (which they have since gone back on quite a bit with a pivot into moodier synth-driven indie rock on later albums), reaching into religious grandiosity and closing on a drawn-out self-indulgent refrain warbling over slogan-y band concept buzzwords.

I can't bring myself to dislike it, though, because there has never been a more cathartically shout-alongable cock rock chorus, and hearing this thing played live, its power became absolutely undeniable to me.

27. Go Go Berlin - Struggle is Real

Remember how I said that Go Go Berlin very much went back on the prancing, self-confident retro rock promise of Bad!? Yeah. The band took a 4 year break from 2015 to 2019, coming back as a much moodier, more synth-driven and often quieter group, wallowing in gentler emotions.

I liked the change, though, and with 2020's Lyfe, I feel they found a compelling niche in the vibes based indie rock space to occupy. Struggle Is Real never fails to feel right for a late night after a stressful day.

28. Green Day - Wake Me Up When September Ends

American Idiot was a truly unavoidable album in the 2000s. I was too young to really understand the anti-war message at the heart of it (I just thought it was funny calling Americans idiots), but Wake Me Up When September Ends has managed to stick with me as More™ than that. The morose plea in the lyrics to sleep rather than live through times which are too painful to face... that's a feeling that's never become less powerful and relevant.

29. Grissini Project - Lilium

I've never actually gotten around to actually watching Elfen Lied, but I encountered the Grissini Project's rendition of the song on YouTube about ten years ago and the vocalist Lilou manages to capture a feeling in her performance, backed up by the strings and piano, that just induces a very specific kind of Mood in me.

30. Cynthia Harrell - Snake Eater

I never really appreciated what Metal Gear Solid 3 was about (or indeed, the franchise as a whole) until well after its heyday, but Cynthia Harrel's performance in this strange riff on the James Bond theme song is iconic for good reason.

The song is nonsensical ("some day you'll feed on a tree frog") and stuck in that peculiar mix of self-seriousness and over-ambitious incomprehensibility that lends much of Kojima's work its charm, and if it wasn't for Harrel's total commitment and astonishing delivery of those high notes, I don't think it would work at all.

I have never climbed a ladder without this playing in my head.

31. Hozier - Eat Your Young

Hozier's curse is that he keeps writing biting satire and heartfelt expressions of pain, and his fans keep making it horny in all the wrong directions. No song in recent memory embodies this curse better than Eat Your Young, which is an earnest plea for human beings to treat one another with a deeper humanity and a condemnation of the ways our social systems push us to feed on each other.

But then he sings the first verse in that tone of voice, and the context collapse becomes inevitable.

And I'm with the fans on this one, to be clear, whatever the intended themes of this song, it's a horned up vampire love-song to me.

32. Ibrahim Electric - Where Is My Bike?

Ibrahim Electric is a long-running Danish jazz fusion band that has made a respectable career touring that scene, but all I've ever really known of them is their 2008 album Brothers of Utopia, which mostly slid off of my brain without leaving an impression at the time (I was too young, and didn't have the context to enjoy it).

Except for this one song. Where Is My Bike? is an irreverent and genuinely quite humorous-feeling hyperactive ditty, absolutely perfect for capturing the feeling of a special kind of ADHD mania which I knew intimately long before I understood it was a symptom of my neurodivergence.

33. Ida Gard - Doors

Doors holds kind of a painful place in my heart. It's a song about being the Other Woman, and the shame and regret and forbidden temptation of making terrible decisions for pleasure.

The chorus brings a chunky electric guitar in that really sells the feeling of sins cutting off your escape routes from yourself. It's a song about facing yourself in the mirror after being used, and knowing that you consented to be used, and that you are complicit.

It's... a feeling I know substantially better than I would like to.

34. Incubus - A Certain Shade of Green

Another of relic of the time when my music taste was shaped by anime AMVs. This was my first encounter with Incubus, a band which would go on to be... never my favourite, never the most important band in my life. A band whose albums I would buy upon release and listen to repeatedly, but never fully identify as a fan of, for some reason which I have never been able to articulate.

Anyway, Piccolo is the best Dragon Ball character, do not @ me.

35. Incubus - Dig

Incubus' lyrics are hit and miss with me. A lot of their songs wander into a poetic mode that seems to me to be enamored with affected vagueness as a substitute for substance. Words that talk past their point with the expectation that a grateful audience will fill in the blanks.

Dig isn't one of those. It is astonishingly clear to me what this song is talking about, and it hits my soul like a bell.

36. Incubus - Isadore

Isadore is the kind of story-song that spawns a movie in my head. Is it a great song? I have no idea. All I know is that the half dozen animated shorts in my imagination for which I have used it as the soundtrack are brilliant and compelling.

37. Jeff Ball, Jake Kaufman - Le Bouquet Magique

The Shovel Knight soundtrack is known for its poundingly heroic and bombastic chiptune bangers, and deservedly so. Jake Kaufman has a style that can comfortably be described as "maximalist" in many cases.

But this remix from the Plague of Shadows soundtrack, taking its romantic chiptune waltz and absolutely slathering it in romantic sentimentality, god it works so goddamn good.

Listen to that goddamn violin and tell me this doesn't sound like love.

38. Janelle Monáe - Make Me Feel

Janelle Monáe, thank you for existing and getting Prince to work on that album.

39. Jonathan Coulton - Womb With a View

Jonathan Coulton's music career began at a time when a nerdy programmer with a penchant for sensitive 70s rock could write silly joke songs about popular science and pop culture tropes and somehow make a living from it on the internet. Everyone knows him for the Portal songs, of course, but much of his early output has... aged the way you would expect early 2000s nerd comedy to age. The novelty has worn off, and the jokes are so very tired.

What makes Coulton more than his parody song contemporaries from the time, though, is his ability to reach for aching sincerity in spite of it all. Womb With A View was written as a jokey gimmick for Popular Science magazine, sandwiched in between a somewhat facile riff on how in the future they'll have magic pills that just make you feel ANY emotion you want man, and a song that imagines how messed up it would be if your Roomba was a T1000 from Terminator.

Womb With A View, though, is written about test tube babies and the idea of growing new life outside of the human body. Coulton makes the decision to absolutely abjure sardonic irony, and instead earnestly imagines two fetuses in neighboring test tubes finding comfort in one another's presence, and plaintively hoping that they will meet again after their births.

It's... achingly romantic, and delivered with such a soft and unpretentious sweetness that I can't help but be charmed by it.

Jonathan Coulton is the reason I learned to play the guitar, and one of the first songs I ever practised was the fingerpicking pattern for this one. I never managed to get it quite right.

40. Jonathan Coulton - Fraud

Coulton moved on from his early years of sardonic pop culture geek rock with 2011's Artificial Heart, an album which quite simply does not have a bad song on it do not @ me. I don't think any song on that album keeps hitting me quite as acutely as Fraud does, though. It's this self-circling meditation on burnout and creative process, backed by velvet soft synth and tinkling guitar work that never settles down or stays in one place. It's anxious and unresolved, and feels absolutely perfectly like creative paralysis and mania.

41. Jonathan Coulton - Brave

If I had heard this song as a 17 year old, I would not have understood how comprehensively and devastatingly I had just been owned.

Hearing it instead as an adult, I am left to simply regret and imagine the person I might have been if only I had understood what this song is trying to say ten years before it actually came out.

42. Jorge Rivera-Herrans & Mason Olshavsky - No Longer You

Epic the Musical took a hot minute to grow on me. I'm not always on board with Rivera-Herrans' lyrics, nor his musical choices.

But No Longer You walks the absolutely perfect line of soaring operatic drama and soap-opera emotionality. It distills the delicious dramatic irony of Greek tragedy into less than 3 minutes with an absolutely absurdly memorable and satisfying melodic hook. I could listen to this on repeat for entire days. And I have. One day I will record a cover.

43. Jorge Rivera-Herrans & KJ Burkhauser - Scylla

Speaking of Epic the Musical. Scylla serves a lot of narrative purpose in the story and is an important thematic inflection point...

But oh my god KJ Burkhauser. Oh my god. Someone give this person a classic Disney villain to voice and sing for, as fast as humanly possible.

44. Kashmir - The Ghost of No One

It astonishes me that this is not the soundtrack for a thousand spooky Halloween AMVs. The vibes are immaculate, and the harmonies are good.

45. Lemon Demon - Aurora Borealis

A concept like "horror-themed Christmas album" from an artist like Neil Cicirega sounds, on the surface, like it should yield at most some kind of classic and infinitely quoted early YouTube viral hit which exhausted millennials will insist to their gen alpha kids is actually brilliant and funny and cool stop rolling your eyes I'm not old I have barely learned to adult yet.

Aurora Borealis is not that. First of all the music bangs, that huge and thumping low end against twinkling starry knight synth riffs. Second... the lyrics are really good? Like, yeah, absolutely, it's playing in the space of "ha ha cosmic horror christmas," but at the core of it seems to be a genuine and heartfelt meditation on a very particular kind of loneliness. A desire to share something real about yourself, even in spite of the certainty that it will drive them away and leave you alone again.

idk if it's the neurodivergence, but that feels extremely Real™ to me.

46. Linkin Park - Somewhere I Belong

I resisted Linkin Park for a long time as a teenager, because it was emo music for girls, which meant that if I listened to it as a boy, that meant I was gay and queer.

And as a bullied kid with a tremendously fragile grasp on his identity and gender, those were powerful deterrents. It was much easier to intellectually distance myself, and hold myself above indulgences as base as "relating to music" or "expressing my angst."

Numb eventually got to me, though, and with that wall broached I finally listened to Meteora properly, and... oh. Oh it turns out that music which expresses all your fears and pains is really cathartic and helpful actually.

It took a long time before I actually became capable of forming myself as a person, but this song helped me along the way.

47. MC Frontalot - Diseases of Yore

I'm a white kid from Scandinavia - the only hip-hop really present in my social circles when I was a teenager was Vanilla Ice, and then eventually Eminem (which was favored by my bullies, which made me stay far away). My closest exposure to gangsta was Weird Al's Amish Paradise and White and Nerdy.

I didn't really develop a relationship with the art form until, through Jonathan Coulton, I got acquainted with MC Frontalot and the concept of nerdcore hip-hop, a deliberately and consciously uncool subgenre applying the grammar and style of hip-hop to... well, nerd sh*t, basically. My kind of sh-t.

Diseases of Yore is a not-very-funny comedy reflection on the progress of health care and medical science, delivered in Frontalot's customary hiccuping lyrical flow, striking with unerring accuracy at my interest in the history of disease. I adore it.

48. MC Frontalot & Jean Grae - Gold Locks

Staying with the nerdcore - back in 2014 or so, Frontalot released Question Bedtime, a series of re-tellings of fairy tales and folklore which, much like Diseases of Yore, hit me like a double type weakness critical hit.

Gold Locks reframes Goldilocks as a horror monster preying on bears, being used as a boogie-man to frighten a bear cub into always locking the door before going to bed. The chorus is an unquestionable earworm, and Jean Grae is delightful as Goldilocks herself, reveling in the cutesy villain role.

49. Midge Ure - The Man Who Sold the World

Every version of The Man Who Sold the World is good. It's kind of magical like that. As you might imagine, I found Midge Ure's rendition on the Metal Gear Solid V soundtrack, and it cemented itself as a perfect moody late night vibe song almost immediately.

50. The Midnight - Brooklyn. Friday. Love

The Midnight screamed onto my playlists with the best saxophone riff of their decade on Vampires, but sort of failed to make a deeper impression on me from then on. They are deep on the vibes, a retro-synth 80s soundtrack perfect for melancholic neon-drenched optimism, but I couldn't tell you any one of their songs from any of the others most of the time.

Brooklyn. Friday. Love. though... f*k me but this song makes me groove and dance. The undeniable saxophone riff is back, but it supports the song rather than dominate it, giving the lyrics and vocals room to control the feeling, and god it makes me desperate to see this imaginary Brooklyn for at least one night.

51. Miley Cyrus - Midnight Sky

I can't imagine how scarring it is to be a Disney Channel nepo kid. What a f*cked up way to have a childhood.

Cyrus seems to have found her footing in adulthood, which is a happy thing, and one of the things she produced along the way was 2020's Plastic Heart, where she reimagined herself as an rough-edged 80s rock siren... and god damn if it isn't the perfect part for her to play. Her voice slots into this genre like it was invented for her, and Midnight Sky is probably the greatest moment on the album. Cavernous reverb, a fat bass-line under Cyrus' scratchy vocals and synths that throb like heartbeats and horniness. I listen to this song on repeat, get bored of it, and fall back in love with it every three months or so.

52. Naethan Apollo - Cannibal

Naethan Apollo is a recent addition to my playlists - I heard his music floating around on TikTok in various fan-edits here and there, and while at first it just didn't click for me, the moment I heard Cannibal off of his Tales From Cazilor concept album it all came together.

Cannibal is this seethingly resentful dissolution of a toxic relationship, delivered with a smile and the sense of a knife held behind the back. It's incredibly evocative, and feels relatable to me in a way which I'm not 100% sure I'm comfortable with.

53. Naethan Apollo - Cost of Living

On the substantially more light-hearted end of Apollo's discography, his most recent single is 2½ minutes of laughing through the pain of late capitalism with a hooky chorus and a warbling electric guitar noodling along with the verses in a way that just baaaarely skirts the edge of being too cheerful.

54. Koji Kondo - Bob-omb Battlefield

The Super Mario Galaxy 2 rendition is probably the best one, but oh my GOD what a generational banger is Bob-omb Battlefield. Koji Kondo bringing the big band to Mario 64 is a match made in heaven. If I don't dance to this, I'm dead.

55. Noriyuki Iwadare - The Steel Samurai (Turnabout Jazz Soul)

The Fragrance of Dark Coffee is probably the far more famous jazz arrangement from this particular album, but the muted trumpet melody line on The Steel Samurai just reaches into my soul and conjures a perfect and peculiar sense of late night city melancholy that I simply don't think I've ever felt from other music before.

56. The Offspring - You're Gonna Go Far, Kid

The Offspring is another band I found through the medium of AMVs (specifically a Naruto AMV set to Come Out and Play), but it's the thumping beat and folk-like dance tune vibe of You're Gonna Go Far, Kid that really hooked me.

It feels like a song with something on its mind, and while I'm sure it's not the meaning that was intended, to me it has come to be a means to catharsis from the stress and miseries of, well, being an online influencer type person. There's a sardonic destruction of fame culture in here, which (being from 2008) clearly wasn't aimed at my career and industry, but which hits close to home nonetheless. It feels good to scream along with.

57. Olivia Rodrigo - vampire

So, uh... vampire is a bad song? I think? I mean, it ought to be! The lyrics are clumsy and first-drafty, overstating the theme to the point it feels like the lyricist is either deeply insecure about their communication skills, or thinks the audience is stupid.

On the other hand, it also feels like it comes from a place of authentic resentment, and it feels like it's targeted at a kind of parasite which I have encountered in my own life. Even at my vanishingly modest level of fame, this kind of person exists, and despite (or because of) its total lack of subtlety, I can't help but find it relatable.

I also can't deny that the way the beat escalates just works for me here. The emotional arc of what the song doing lands, and maybe the lyrics don't need to be Shakespeare in order for that to make a good song.

58. Paul and Storm - Better Off Dead

The musical comedy duo Paul and Storm had a bit where they would perform bite-sized style parodies, frequently taking aim at the style and delivery of Randy Newman in particular.

It's the kind of joke that's funny to my dad, and wears out its welcome fast. It really shouldn't be compelling for more than one or two listens.

But. Then they had the idea of composing a theme to the film It's A Wonderful Life in this jokey-joke Newman style, and it ended up so sincere and genuinely heartfelt that I just can't help but get invested. Storm DiCostanzo keeps his impression from spilling into the cartoony, and the piano accompaniment runs through some really well-chosen harmonizations, and the result is... a genuinely quite emotional song about contemplating suicide.

59. Poor Man's Poison - Feed the Machine

Anticapitalist folk-inflected swag rock? I am not immune.

60. Queen - '39

I feel like we sometimes forget what a weird and dorky band Queen really was. Everyone remembers the triumphant rock god power of Freddy Mercury, it's all Bohemian Rhapsody guitar solos and We Are The Champions.

But '39 is a folk ballad about people setting out to sea and yearning for home, except from the perspective of a futuristic society of sci-fi spacefarers, mourning the alienation of time dilation that brings the sailors home barely aged a day while their home planet has advanced a century or more.

It rules. It rules so hard.

61. Robbie Williams - One For My Baby

It's a Frank Sinatra classic, obviously, but... I think Robbie Williams did it better. It doesn't hurt that he has Bill Miller on the piano at the height of his experience and powers, but Williams' quavering crooning really does work with this style of contemplative piano bar torch song. It's not the gravitas of Sinatra, it's... a different feeling. A little younger, a little more smarmy, but not less sincere, I think.

62. Sidecar Astronauts - Back in my Arms

Sidecar Astronauts is a fictional band that only ever released one album, and god I wish they had done more. Back in my Arms is this "I hate you I love you" flip-flopping hate romance at the end of a long and toxic relationship, and whatever your feelings about the rest of the song, the bridge is perfect poetry.

I reach for your face and see // A life before the colder days // But each time we embrace I feel // A knife between my shoulder blades // A thousand cuts from a charmer // Now the hilts in my back are my armor

that's some f*ing imagery baybeeeeeee

63. System of a Down - Toxicity

My friend Adam introduced me to System of a Down when we were teenagers. He would go on to become an accomplished metal drummer, I would go on to fail to understand the intensely political and anti-war messages of the band's songs for a decade and a half.

My appreciation for SOAD has only grown with time, though, it's music that's never lost its ability to engage me.

64. Tarja Turunen - Ave Maria

Schubert's Ave Maria is a transcendently beautiful composition. It transports me, and hearing it performed by a talented performer in an actual church is an experience I recommend to everyone at least once in their life.

I have never listened to Nightwish much, but vocalist Tarja Turunen deploys a pitch-perfect soprano for the song here. It's genuine pleasure every moment it plays.

65. Taylor Swift - the last great american dynasty

I've already done an entire video essay about my feelings on this song, and I won't rehash them here except to say I wish Taylor Swift had never become a world-conquering pop titan, because I like her so much better writing songs like this.

66. Taylor Swift & Florence + The Machine - Florida

Florence Welch is the vast majority of the power behind this song, but she and Swift work surprisingly well together here, backed by what I think is a compellingly huge wall-of-sound instrumental. The lyrics are about small and ordinary lives, but the music gives it the gravitas of a neon-drenched sci-fi fantasy epic. It sidesteps most of Swift's bad lyrical habits, and sounds like poetry that's meant to touch someone, rather than poetry that's meant to farm likes on Instagram.

67. Tee Lopes - Studiopolis Zone, Act 1

The Sonic Mania soundtrack is a gift that keeps on giving. Studiopolis Act 1 is a banger that keeps on banging. That f*ing call and response structure is so endlessly compelling, it's joy in sonic (ha!) form.

68. Tim Christensen - Right Next to the Right One

Tim Christensen is the great Danish rock crooner, a reputation he cemented back in 2003 with the sappy sad-boy theme to a Danish TV romantic drama that I formed a decent part of my identity around resenting and hating as a teenager.

I hated it, of course, because it spoke genuinely to a part of me which I was afraid to face and accept, for which reason I secretly listened to it "ironically" but only on headphones and only when nobody would hear it.

God, I was a loser. The song is good though!

69. Tim Christensen - Superior

Speaking of songs that speak to parts of myself that I hate to be reminded of. "Superior" cuts to the heart of my affected intellectualism and all the ways I've tried to use it to substitute for emotional maturity. If you want a sense of the ways in which I have scuttled relationships in my life, well, this song is a documentary.

70. Tina Dico - Let's Get Lost

This is probably one of my favourite duet songs ever. It's a song about wanting to escape, and get lost both from your troubles and in the embrace of someone else just as fucked up and scared as you are. Mark Weston's baritone melds perfectly with Dico on the chorus, and the harmonies are so f*ing good.

71. His Theme - Toby Fox

There's nothing I can say about the music of Undertale which is not better understood simply by playing the game and listening to it.

It is magic.

72. Et sted derude - TV-2

This is one of those songs I just hope, at a baseline, is true. Somewhere out there, behind your dreams, a world awaits full of longing. Somewhere out there, behind your dreams, a longing is calling you by name.

I just hope it's true.

73. Weird Al - Virus Alert

Weird Al is famous for his parodies, of course, but his originals are solid music and composition, and hold up better than quite a lot of comedy music over time.

74. Østkyst Hustlers - Penge ind på torsdag

Østkyst Hustlers enjoyed a brief bit of international fame when they released "the world's longest rap" - an 80 minute concept album telling a story about a couple of scam artists selling fake drugs to a biker gang and nearly dying in a shootout.

It was produced and distributed by the Danish National Radio's children's radio, for reasons that are impossible to explain.

Penge ind på torsdag is a song that I feel like has held up quite well, by the virtue of having a really solid western guitar based beat and lyrics marinating in a kind of relaxed self-ironic late 90s cynicism that nonetheless takes joy in looking forward to the little pleasures in life.

It's good f*ing vibes, man. It's just good vibes.

75. Willow & Travis Barker - t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l

Willow Smith wasn't my bet for a pop punk revival artist but god damn if she doesn't fit well into the role. The entire lately I feel EVERYTHING album is worth listening to, but t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l has a drive and energy to it I find endlessly compelling.

76. Adele - Someone Like You

Someone Like You is the most I Am Not Over It song about being totally over it song I have ever heard in my life, and there's something delicious about the tragedy in that. So many times in the song it feels like the singer is juuuust on the verge of understanding what she's doing, and then every single time the bitterness and pain pulls her back into denial, and it's perfect drama.

77. Nobuo Uematsu & Susan Calloway - Dragonsong

I can't say to what degree I was simply Stockholm Syndromed into loving this song by the six thousand times I had to hear the central leitmotif repeated while playing Heavensward, but it damn well worked.

The operatic self-seriousness of the lyrics also match the vibe of FFXIV as a game nearly perfectly. It's all a bit much and a bit overwrought, but that's exactly what it should be.

78. Gorillaz - November Has Come

I don't think I've ever quite understood what this song is about, but I have always been drawn in by its beat and its vibe, and MF Doom's flow on the verses. Nothing else will ever feel like listening to Demon Days did in 2005.

79. Grover Washington Jr. & Bill Withers - Just The Two Of Us

Has there ever been a better ode to the concept of relationships? There's a single version of this song attributed to Bill Withers which cuts out the lengthy instrumentals, but I feel like that's almost missing the point of the whole composition.

It lasts forever because it lasts forever, see? It lasts forever.

80. Harry Styles - As It Was

Knowing next to nothing about the One Direction boys, As It Was came across to me as a kind of ode to ADHD paralysis. It certainly captured a lot of the sense of self-isolation and alienation that comes along with my particular diagnosis, and I've always heard it as a lament over losing time to brain problems you have no hand in controlling. Also, those drum fills on the chorus? Those slap.

81. Imagine Dragons & J.I.D - Enemy

It's J.I.D.s verse that elevates this song from being just another chunk of Imagine Dragons swag rock. And to the band's credit, they compose and balance themselves well around his feature as the centrepiece of the song. There's a paranoid tension in the music here that suits the theme, and which provides a fantastic contrast to J.I.D.s confident but manic delivery.

82. Sam Griffin - Wood Carving Partita

Wood Carving Partita from Symphony of the Night is a solid composition that delivers the baroque vibes needed by the game for the area it appears in.

Sam Griffin, by taking the composition and transposing it from the harpsichord to a singular guitar performance, elevates it to something entirely different. There's a complexity in the composition which becomes apparent to me here that I just couldn't hear in the original for whatever reason.

83. Shoji Meguro & Lyn - Beneath the Mask

I eventually lost my patience with Atlus, and had to stop playing Persona 5, when the game's underlying reactionary conservatism poked its head through the narrative one too many times - along with some profoundly ugly homophobia that I just couldn't stomach.

It's one of those games that I mourn, deeply, that I cannot go back to and enjoy, because so much of what's in there is worth enjoying and celebrating, but there's just a wall there that I don't have the energy to climb anymore.

The music is fantastic, though. There will always be that.

84. Yoko Shimomura - Dearly Beloved

There will never be a composition as plaintive and mournful as Dearly Beloved in my life again. Violins swelling and retreating like waves on the shore, and twinkling piano taps widening into chords, building the base for horns and woodwinds to join in and swell the music like a tide rolling in.

It's perfect.

85. Johnny Cash - Hurt

Another song it feels redundant to try to say anything about. What you need to know about the song is the song. You listen, and you know.

86. Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven

I don't give a sh-t what anyone says. Not only should everyone learn to play this on guitar, they should play it as often and as gratuitously as they f*ing want.

"Oh but I get tired of hearing it too much"

skill issue

87. Tre Watson - Cinder & Ash

Tre composed this song for my video series, and did such a pitch-perfect job of suffering my notes and corrections.

I was afraid my work would be tied at the hip to a Kevin MacLeod song I picked out in an afternoon forever, and if not for Tre's compositional ability, it probably would be. I want so very badly to pay them to compose a full-length version of this, or a whole entire goddamn album. I just want more.

88. Motoi Sakuraba - Gwyn, Lord of Cinder

~ Pling pling plong ~

It's a tedious observation at this point, but what a surprise this composition is. Dark Souls music tends to play at a baseline with loud, discordant orchestral grandiosity, but here, now, at the end of the quest, you get this dramatic, mournful lament, performed entirely on a single instrument. It's not quiet or demure, though, it's in constant motion, pushing forward and forward and forward, faltering ever so slightly here and there but never stopping.

It's a very good composition.

89. sungazer - Macchina

I won't pretend to understand a tenth of the music theory that underpins sungazer's enthusiastic jazz fusion, but I know a vibe when I hear one, and this is that.

90. Vangelis - Blade Runner Blues

What a beautiful and mournful thing this is. The quiet soulfulness of a lone jazz pianist in a smoky bar, but delivered through the buzzy ambience of 80s synthesizers. This is what you put on when you want to make yourself melancholic on a rainy day, brackets positive.

91. TWRP & The Protomen - Phantom Racer

TWRP are probably one of the tightest performing groups of deliberately cheesy retro synth rockers you'll ever hear in your life, but I do often feel like they need the collaboration of others to fully complete their sound and make it something special.

The Protomen (and Arin Hansen as the announcer) provide just exactly that for Phantom Racer, a story song about futuristic Speed Racer antics and bloody revenge, running through movements with a real sense of drama and even genuine pain in the delivery from the vocalist. It goes f*ing hard, I tell ya.

92. Tom Petty - Louisiana Rain

I don't have anything to say about this song. I just like it.

93. David Wise - Stickerbrush Symphony

Man Tasked With Making Score For A Monkey Riding A Swordfish Underwater Creates Transcendent Piece Of Music, wrote Tyler Simpson for Hard Drive in 2020, making a lighthearted joke of David Wise bringing his whole entire goddamn A-game to the soundtrack of Donkey Kong Country 1.

He did it again for Donkey Kong Country 2, where Stickerbrush Symphony - a piece meant to score two athletic monkeys jumping around in a bramble patch - somehow turns out as a rolling, melodically complex vibes piece running through distinct movements while making space for a call-and-response duet of wind instruments almost having an argument over what the sound of the song should be.

94. Denzel Curry - Bulls on Parade

Bulls on Parade was always good, but holy hell of a god damn does Denzel Curry make it his goddamn own in his cover. It is missing Tom Morello's specific touch on guitar a little bit (apologies to the person playing in the cover), but once the rap kicks in, nothing else matters.

95. R.E.M. - Losing My Religion

A song which is endlessly potent for memes and riffs and parodies, it nonetheless does manage to hit home with me as it goes. I've never been religious, nor have I ever lost it, but that's not really what the song is about either, is it? It's a title and poetic conceit that's juuuust edgy enough to offend the right kind of reactionary, even as the song itself has nothing to do with its surface themes. And I like that a lot.

96. The Proclaimers - I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)

If you want a review of this song, go watch Todd in the Shadows' One Hit Wonderland about it, but honestly I think this is another one of those "the song is all you need to know about the song" sorts of situations.

It's a goofball cheerful, relentlessly driving love-song, sung at the absolute top of your lungs, preferably while you're just a little bit drunk. All it needs from you is a willingness to sing "DAH DAH DAH DAH" when it calls it out.

97. Prince - Purple Rain

This is a kind of song that literally everyone in the world could try to cover, or shout out at karaoke, but only one person could ever have originated it. I know very little about Prince, but I know something special when I hear it. 8 minutes of whiny-but-romantic rock ballad interspersed with screaming guitar virtuosity. Genuine miracle of a song, this.

98. Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here

I feel, once again, that there's nothing worthwhile that a beardy white thirtysomething can say about a Pink Floyd song that hasn't been said a million times already. I guess all there is to add is that this is what bitter regret sounds like, to me.

99. Tom Waits - God's Away on Business

Tom Waits' gravel-voiced circus cynicism about the state of the world is a genuine balm sometimes. Sometimes you just need to hear the sonic embodiment of the dirt itself rasp away at the horror of the human condition. Somehow, it makes it more bearable.

100. Chopin - Prelude in E minor Op. 28 No. 4

I remember them this way.