These are not the best songs of all time. In fact, I consider a lot of my personal favorite songs to be, well, not very good. Several of my favorite bands (like Helmet and Hum) didn't make the list at all.
I went through my iTunes and my memory, adding songs as I went. At one point the list was over 300 songs. It took a good long while for me to narrow that down to a list close enough to 100 (104, to be precise) that I felt it was as tidy a list as I could make. I shared it on Facebook on June 15.
I've made a few changes to the list since then, removing a song or two, adding a song or two. (I knew it was time to remove something if, while listening to the playlist I made of these songs, I tended to skip a certain song. For several weeks, I listened to only this playlist, so this was by no means an easy test to pass. The songs that remain on the list have play counts now in the triple digits in the last couple of months alone, and I'm still not sick of them somehow.) The list now stands at 101 songs.
Over the next few months, I intend to blog as often as I find the time on each song from the list. But for today, I'll share a few statistics. Of the 101 songs on the list as it stands now (for it's never really final):
43 songs feature a woman (or girl) on lead vocals
2 songs have no vocals at all
20 songs have at least one guitar solo
5 songs have three guitar solos
7 songs feature a steel guitar
6 songs have no discernible guitar playing at all
10 songs are shorter than 2:30
2 songs are longer than 6:00
1 song won a Grammy
1 song has me singing back-up vocals
So watch this space for the complete and final (for now) list, day by day (when I have time).
