The Track List

1. Noah & The Whale - Five Years Time
2. Go! Team - Bottle Rocket
3. The Owls - Air
4. Apples in Stereo - Same Old Drag
5. Texas Governor - Faith, Hope, Love & Jesus
6. American Analog Set - The Postman
7. Rose Melberg - Cast Away the Clouds
8. Kissing Book - Selfish
9. Tullycraft - Twee
10. Zero 7 - In the Waiting Line
11. Rachels - Last Things Last
12. Sufjan Stevens - Chicago
13. Postal Service - DC Sleeps Alone Tonight
14. Pants Yell! - The City Life
15. Some Girls - Necessito
16. Magnetic Fields - Stray With Me
17. OK Go - This Will Be Our Year
18. Yo La Tengo - Black Flowers
19. A.C. Newman - On the Table
20. The Clean - Stars
21. Happy Bullets - The Disquieting Letter
22. Sisterhood of Convoluted Thinkers - Better Days Coming Now
23. Britta Phillips & Dean Wareham - Ginger Snaps
24. Aislers Set - Fire Engines
25. Peter, Bjorn and John - Young Folks
26. New Pornographers - The Laws Have Changed
27. Regina Spektor - Us
28. Shumai - The Lonely Passion of Joey Heatherton
29. Tom Waits - Hoist That Rag
30. Coconut Records - West Coast
31. Boy Crazy - Bad Things
32. Radio Dept. - Pulling Our Weight
33. Death Cab For Cutie - Transatlanticism
34. Mountain Goats - Dance Music
35. Yann Tiersen - La Valse d'Amelie
36. We Are Jeneric - Sir Charles the II
37. Eels - Bus Stop Boxer
38. Telegraph Melts - Septembrist
39. Edwin Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros - Home
40. Ted Leo & the Pharmacists - Under the Hedge

On with the countdown!

#20 to 1

Download
Stream

My top 40 songs of the decade (with commentary)

Inspired by my friend Dave, who preceded me as music director at our college radio station in the 1980s and who just published a list of his top 300 songs of the decade (!), I assembled a more modest top 40.

These are songs, not artists (indeed, there are a few artists here for whom I only own one song), but I did decide not to repeat any artists.

My original thought was to do this as an old-fashioned mix tape (except on cd) - but with 20 recipients at 3 cds each that was going to be a lot of postage and plastic (I couldn't get it down to two cds - somewhere along the way I started liking a lot of 6 minute songs) . So then I thought podcast, but after a few hours I felt like I had less understanding of the concept than when I started. So here are two formats I was able to figure out: a single big audio file you can download or stream.

Songs 40 to 21:
download (about 75 MB)
stream

Check back in a few days for 20 to 1.