25 most played songs

...of all my time. Because I grew up in a nuclear shelter of a family, hyper-Christian and conservative in a way that makes Pleasantville look like Sin City, I only really started listening to music in high school, and then really seriously listened in university. So, my all time = your last ten years.

And I was going to do my own best-of-the-decade list, but who cares? And what do I know from best? The songs that matter are the ones we play on repeat... As for the ten-year thing, if I included only songs made between 2000 and now, it wouldn't be true at all.

Here, in the order I thought of them in, the twenty-five.

1. 1979
I only knew that this song was one I should love, that it was deja entendu, and that it had been playing in my head since I was in pigtails, even though that's not possible. I didn't know the name. Then my ex-boyfriend forced me to watch Clerks 2, and there, deep in maybe the shittiest movie ever, was that magic noise. It's "1979," he told me. Like how did I not know that? Well, I don't know. If you didn't grow up with Nirvana, you wouldn't know the Smashing Pumpkins either. I embraced this song instantly, completely, and without context. And after he told me what it was, I made him play it for me all the time, and I downloaded it and put it on night after night and woke up when it was finishing the 96th spin.

2. Float On
Would I have kept living without "Float On"? Not a rhetorical question.

3. Wonderwall
This was the first song that my first boyfriend put on the first mix cd anyone ever made for me. I listened to it on my bus home from my first day of class in first year university, and I was smiling, the only one on the bus smiling, and super-aware of it.

4. Maps
Stunning, transcendent, all heartstrungout, perfect in its aching restraint, "Maps" is a lump in your throat, and when you pull it out, it's a diamond.

5. Ceremony
First time I heard this song, I was wearing 100% Gap: tank tops in two (!!) shades of turquoise, and a khaki skirt. I admit this so you understand that I am a different person now, and yet, I still feel "Ceremony" in my bones.

6. Ex-Factor
Lauryn Hill's Miseducation was the first cd I ever bought, and I'm really proud of that. When she sang "Ex-Factor" under the covers after curfew, I felt like yes, this is what my love is gonna be like.

7. Unbreak My Heart
What happened to Toni Braxton?! This woman's the hottest unrequited lover in song. Plus, the way she rolls her r's makes Rihanna sound like Taylor Swift.

8. Such Great Heights
Another mix disc classic, and the best thing Ben Gibbard will ever do. Like the "everything" he sings of, it sounds perfect (even more so) from far away, from years now, and from decades too, I bet.

9. Love Will Tear Us Apart
You've figured out by now that I'm an emo, right?

10. Torn
...And so's Natalie Imbruglia. I remember my mom (sincerely, fearfully) thought this was a song about rape, because why else would a woman be lying naked on the floor, feeling a little torn? Mom. Ew.

11. Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl
With due apologies to Stevie Nicks, no song ever made me feel more nostalgic for that wasted age.

12. Hallelujah (Jeff Buckley version)
So much more beautiful than the original, it's blasphemous. And yet, undeniable.

13. A Scale, a Mirror, and Those Indifferent Clocks
A minor bit in the Conor Oberst canon (aside: did you know my "true blue" tattoo is the Bright Eyes song, not the Madonna one? Uh-huh) but for me, a moment. God and I were coming apart, not slowly, and this, I guess, was our breakup song. (If these lyrics aren't an atheist manifesto, don't tell me. I'll shatter.)

14. Last Nite
Just fucking epic.

15. Toxic
The great Britney song, and how I learned to shimmy.

16. Don't Speak
That I've never sung this at a karaoke birthday is shameful.

17. Time to Pretend
It was a coin-toss between this and "Kids," but when "Kids" won, I tossed again. Nothing sums up the diefast ennui of my generation, and our problems of leisure, better than this.

18. Lucky
This would be my favourite Radiohead song: it goes "kill me Sar-ahhh, kill me agaaaiiiin... with love." It is a bad idea to play this full-volume when you're driving on the highway or trying a new drug or having unprotected sex because it makes you feel supernatural, omnipotent. (Oh, don't worry, I don't actually do that. I don't even know how to drive!)

19. Bleeding Love
To paraphrase: I don't care what you say, I'm in love with r&b ballads by improbably scorned women!

20. Fake Empire
I couldn't choose a song from The National's Boxer; it's one of very few records I've listened to faithfully in its entirety, time after time. So I went with the opener. Before the man was mine, I knew he would love this album. (Any more triumphant feeling than knowing when someone you love will love something? No, I don't think so.) I was right, and now it's ours.

21. Lovefool
Romeo + Juliet = best movie, and movie soundtrack, of high school. And this, the best song.

22. The Scientist
Yes, I loved Coldplay, and yes, of course, I learned to play this song on the piano. Backwards.

23. Running Up That Hill (Chromatics version)
When I blogged my adoration for the Chromatics, a best friend's ex-bf said, well, of course. It's, like, emo-electro. I thought that was soo perfect. (Later, I'd discover that this genre had already been wrought and, practically, perfected by Erasure, in the year I was born.) Anyway, this spacey, glistening cover sounds more like being chauffered up that hill in a hovercar, but I love it.

24. Empire State of Mind
Actually, I have listened to the NY, NY anthem enough times in the last six months to earn it a spot on this list. Thanks. I think it's the "Don't Stop Believin" of our time, and you can feel about that how you will.

25. All My Friends
Thanks to its lead role in the trailer for Greenberg, which my own G. will not stop fucking playing, James Murphy's silver-tongued and shiveringly true lament gets my last spot. If you want to know, it beat out both the Pixies' "Where is My Mind?" and the Alanis manslayer, "You Oughta Know."