Coming up...

I'm busy putting together a list of songs that were important to me - that are important to my life, my love of music, but most importantly they're a list of the songs that affected me first.

I was busy putting together a list of music for two friends at school who sit with me and sing a capella versions of the cheesiest songs we can think of from the seventies, eighties, and especially the early nineties, when suddenly I discovered all these songs had something in common. All of them were songs that in one way or another played a huge importance in my understanding of what makes songs ... tick, for lack of a better word. What is it that drew me to these songs, and why? And what happened after receiving Pearl Jam's "10" in fifth or sixth grade that changed all that?

The parameters I have set for this list are:

1) No more than 125 songs can be applied to the list.
2) No more than one song per artist.
3) No music by Michael Jackson, James Taylor, Billy Joel, The Beatles, or anything else weighted with strong parental influence may be included. In other words, these songs all have to be personal discoveries, either through channels like friends, radio mix tapes (of which I had hundreds), or the occasional memory of MTV - which we didn't have until after Pearl Jam.
4) Most importantly, this cannot include songs from the time period that I later loved and wished to have listened to at the time. It must be music that I honestly listened to at the time, whether I still do or not.