When Pitchfork released their list of the top 500 songs of the decade earlier this year, I had two reactions: 1) Holy shit, the decade is ending; and 2) Because I like music and have a blog, people are going to care what my top 500 songs of the decade were. I know that only one of these statements is true, but that won’t stop me from proceeding. I won’t do 500. Maybe 200. Probably 100.

This is also, of course, an attempt to rectify some of Pitchfork’s omissions. I know that’s the first thing a person does when considering anyone else’s Best Of list—”Two tracks from Illinoise but nothing from Michigan? Are you INSANE?”—but I’m not trying to correct or argue with Pitchfork. They’re very good at what they do, and our lists overlap in a lot of places.

But I dare say my list is more diverse than theirs. There are advantages to not being Pitchfork: I don’t have to reach any kind of consensus among dozens of editors and staff writers. I don’t have to cater, deliberately or otherwise, to my readership’s taste; it doesn’t matter how closely I hew to a numerical rating I gave a song when it was originally released. I can consider songs that weren’t singles and songs that were never released. Songs by unsigned bands. Songs by bands I was in (sorry).

What’s more, this project will pretty much force me to conduct a comprehensive survey of some people, places, and events I probably haven’t thought about much in a long time, as I try and remember where I was the first, eleventh, or three hundredth time I heard each song. I suppose that’s inevitable when you organize your life along the axes of artists, albums and songs. (For example, I can’t tell you what day I began working at Barnes & Noble [thank god], but I can tell you that I first heard “Singing Softly to Me” by Kings of Convenience on the car radio in the parking lot before going inside for training.)

I’ve tried to limit myself to one song per album, per artist. And they’re more or less in chronological order. Has it really been ten years? I love getting older (kind of).

Aimee Mann, “Deathly” I should warn you that the first several songs on this list soundtracked a months-long pining after an unattainable member of the opposite sex, and no music accompanies a bit of besotted postcollegiate melancholy like that of Aimee Mann. Bachelor #2 wasn’t just an album, it was an event and a mood, preceded by the Magnolia soundtrack and the film itself, an exercise in indulgent melodrama. And when I was 23 I was the perfect target for that film’s operatic excess and Aimee Mann’s lush, beautifully anguished compositions.

Elliott Smith, “In The Lost & Found” The other day I walked into Spyhouse and almost walked right back out again because they were playing Figure 8, and my associations with it are that fraught. But then I thought: Jesus Christ. Man up. And besides, if I hadn’t sat down and sat with it, from “Junk Bond Trader” straight through till the end, then I probably wouldn’t have been reminded how perfect this song is, and how perfect the bridge’s lyric, which looks so trite in print that I’ll just let the music speak for itself.

Sigur Ró, “Svefn-g-englar” This song originally greeted the world in 1999, but I am going to exploit the same 2001-Stateside-release loophole that Pitchfork did. I can only listen to this song in very specific circumstances, and even then it’s almost too beautiful to bear. But I found it highly appropriate when it came burbling up underneath This American Life’s exploration of last year’s financial collapse, the reversed instruments and unintelligible lyrics in a song from the beginning of the decade underscoring an irreversible catastrophe of ineffable scope at its end.

The Avalanches, “Radio” This can’t be literally true, but Since I Left You seemed to be playing in the background of every sweaty, drunken, small-town party I attended during the decade’s first three summers. Like the music of the Avalanches, there was nothing linear, orderly, or goal-oriented about the social circles to which I attached myself in Grinnell or Iowa City back then. With college behind us, our living arrangements and allegiances became more fragmented and diffuse; the 1990s and the album era were both over, and we were all getting iPods and blogs. Sending those digital signals, indeed.

Eels, “It’s A Motherfucker” And sometimes you just need to be really, really sad and miss someone a great deal. I did plenty of that too over the past decade. Duh, we all did.

Badly Drawn Boy, “The Shining” Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, a lot of the songs on this list I can barely stand to hear anymore. “In The Lost And Found” is the first obvious example; this is another one. Right from the cello-and-french-horn prelude, this song employs two of the Western world’s saddest-sounding instruments. It was all kinds of wrong for me when I first heard it—in a very confused post-collegiate state when I didn’t need to be indulging any (more) maudlin exercises by singer-songwriters—and when I hear it these days I just kind of cringe and feel sorry for my 25-year-old self. So wait, am I saying that I can barely tolerate my favorite music? Yes, I suppose I am. Shit.

Boards of Canada, “Kid For Today” I came to Boards of Canada late, not discovering Music Has The Right To Children until 2002. But then I quickly snatched up everything I could find—all the remixes, B-sides, and mysterious recordings of dubious authorship the grey-market internet had to offer. This gorgeous EP was completely legitimate, however, and thank god for that.

Deltron 3030, “Positive Contact” I’m still not sure there’s a hip-hop album I love as unconditionally, soup to nuts, as Deltron 3030 (well, maybe The Love Below—does that even count as hip-hop?). Del and Dan the Automator (and Blackalicious, and Outkast, and many others) gave us ample reason to be optimistic about the state of hip-hop at the dawn of the new millennium. As I get older I have less and less time for that aforementioned wince-inducing acoustic-guitar sad-sack music (though there is still, of course, a place and time for everything). Instead, more often than not, I opt for shit like this that just makes me feel good. There isn’t a rainy day invented that can’t be improved by giving this album a thorough spin.

Fatboy Slim, “Song For Shelter” What a strange thing this song is. A dark ambient club anthem, a raver’s manifesto, a spoken word piece mashed up with techno, the unlikely backdrop to the climax of Larry Clark’s devastating Bully—which is where I discovered it, which is maybe why my associations surrounding this song aren’t purely jubilant. Plus, it’s Fatboy Slim, so it’s hard to convince most people that Norman Cook used to do some pretty good shit. But lord, when the beat drops, it does everything a club track is supposed to do. So fuck the haters, etc.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, “Storm” So I came into the decade, and will leave it, worshiping Tortoise. But in between I dug deeper into post-rock, and somewhere in there toward the beginning Godspeed You! Black Emporer unleashed this beast on the world. How many Sunday afternoons during the winter of 2001 did I spend half-awake listening to Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven on headphones? (Answer: several.) Very little else I’ve heard since then—by this band or any other—approaches the majesty of this piece’s opening section.