Songs!

Bryan and I had a low-key weekend in which we took in not one, but two movies, a rare thing made possible by Bryan's agreeing to accompany me on an escape from the reality of mortgages and wedding details for a bit (into the world of The Corpse Bride and the 40 Year Old Virgin, both delightful in their own way). I did manage to badly sand the walls in the upstairs kitchen in preparation for the wainscotting, look for djs on craigslist, and clean almost every floor in our apartment.

Bryan, accountant by vocation, statistician by avocation, compiled the QHS Song List v1.0 for the reading pleasure of our blog audience. As mentioned in an earlier blog, seven of us contributed 25 songs each, then voted from the combined pool of 174 songs for the top 75 songs. Bryan statsified our selections into a top 50 list, followed by an unranked 50-100 list. The result is quite interesting, and while it wouldn't be my personal top 50 list, it does cut across many genres, decades and styles to illustrate the power of music: many of the same songs inspired 7 very different people (most of the top 50 received votes from 4-7 people), and yet, with 174 to choose from, only 11 songs were left out in the cold with zero votes, so almost every song grabbed someone.

I found this list so much more difficult to rank than movies or albums because what does make one song better than another, and on whose criteria should we base that value? The enjoyment of a song is a personal expression, and as Bryan writes in his intro to the list, liking a song today does not mean that you will like that same song in 10 years [though I do admit, I had to stop myself from nominating some pretty bad 80s songs that still speak to me, some might say in tongues]. Enjoy the list; only 2 and a half months til the QHS Albums List gets updated.