My first 'favorite song' that I heard on the radio. Still slaps

The first album I remember owning was a cassette of this. For some reason I always listened to the first side and then got distracted and never flipped it

This was my go-to song to listen to when I came home from school feeling stressed out. I think I had the album on cassette. I'd cue it up and then walk in circles, rewinding when the song ended, until I had worked out all the bad feelings. "Texarkana" on the same album gets honorable mention as a song I liked to listen to when I was feeling better

I was totally fascinated by this song and music video when it came out. But it wasn't as popular a single as "Where It's At" and kind of disappeared quickly. I didn't buy the album until I was significantly older. This was probably the first song with a lot of sampling and other DJ tricks that I heard (I didn't listen to rap at all until I was older).

This was the first CD I purchased with my own money. I got interested in Depeche Mode when I heard "It's No Good" on the radio and I think I just liked the cover of this one (or maybe I recognized "People Are People"?). At the time I was also becoming a baby socialist through the ham-handed work of Jack London so the equally ham-handed political posturing of Depeche Mode appealed to me. I still think this song/album are really good.

The first CD I bought with my own money was a Depeche Mode album. "It's No Good" and "Barrel of a Gun" came out in 1997 and I loved the dark synth sounds and Dave Gahan's sultry voice. The first concert I went to without my parents was their 1998 tour with Stabbing Westward. I quickly found that I preferred their older albums, but to be true to the spirit of this league I picked a song from that album, Ultra.

Around this time my friends started forming increasingly strict ideas on what music was not cool to listen to. The emerging genre of "nu metal" was not cool, or anything that could be described as "rap rock". I tried hopelessly to convince my punk rock fans that this was not "rap rock". I failed.

This is the first song I've picked that I don't still love. Other things I listened to then that don't hold up: RHCP's One Hot Minute. Sublime. I had a Bush album but I don't remember listening to it.

Early high school was the filesharing era. Between that and being able to buy albums with my own money, I started listening to all kinds of stuff, including jazz and hip-hop. I think I learned about KRS-ONE because he guested on an R.E.M. song? Kris was later known for being a "conscious" rapper but this was more of a gangsta precursor. I picked this song because it was on a weird playlist I had on my janky old laptop that I brought to school, like a nerd.

A combination of mental illness, no longer giving a fuck about what society expected of me, and dating a delinquent pothead meant that I went from straight A student to nearly dropping out. This album was the soundtrack for skipping school after lunch to get high, get laid, and play computer games. As fun as that sounds, the sad truth was that I was about as miserable as I'd ever be in my life. Many years later I would revisit Pixies and then get super into all things Kim Deal.

This was the album I was listening to during a very memorable time in my teenage life. It might have been a bad omen that the entire album is pretty much about terrible, harmful relationships. The Cardigans are a great band, I really recommend their other albums too. Nina Persson in particular is a wonderful singer. She makes this absolutely horrifying lyric quite beautiful.

After staggering out of night school with a diploma, I had a few brief but memorable employment experiences. The one that actually stuck featured Sean, a true teddy bear of a man who whom I owe more than I can say. He would offer me a ride to work and pick me up in his tiny, clattering hooptie and we'd semi-not-really-ironically listen to Manowar and hoot and holler. That guy absorbed a lot of crazy from me over the years, really helped keep me from going off the rails. We're still in touch!

 I think everybody has heard the story of me leaning against the outer wall of my rental to leech off of my neighbor's unsecured wifi. I watched a lot of grainy early YouTube videos of P-Funk concerts. It's hard to choose but this is definitely a top 10, maybe top 5 P-Funk song for me. Great singing and guitar from Garry Shider.

No touching story this time, really. I just got super into DEVO in my early twenties. Saw them three times, still have a couple of cool shirts (that don't fit) and an energy dome (that never fit). I was always fond of Duty Now For The Future, even though it's not their best album -- it's basically all of their songs that didn't make the cut for Are We Not Men? -- because it's an interesting inflection point between scuzzy proto-post-punk DEVO & slick synth-pop DEVO. Dave Marsh famously HATED it.

 This was maximum DEVO era for me. Had the T-shirts, went to the shows, etc.

By this point pretty much all of my preconceived opinions about what genres were cool and which weren't had gone away, so I was catching up on a lot of stuff I had neglected. Country, metal, and hip hop in particular. I chose this album because I remember being amused about falling into a classic Onion-style "white guy finally gets into rap and can't shut up about Illmatic" stereotype. It's a really good album, though!

Early 20s is when I started really getting into hip hop, country, and metal (although I'd listened to music in all of those genres for years). I remember listening to this album and Black Star a lot. As usual, Busta Rhymes is amazing. I think he could make a reading of the phone book entertaining. Mos Def does a credible job keeping up, which is about as much as anyone can do with Busta.

Willie is a great songwriter but he didn't write this one, Fred Rose did. But Willie made it his own. Simply one of the greatest songs ever recorded, and Willie makes it sound so old and elemental that you'd think he interpreted it off a cave wall in Lascaux. It's also the first song I ever sang where I felt like it was really me singing, and not a performance or an imitation. I will always love it and I hope someone plays it over my bones when I'm gone to "a land that knows no parting".

 So many songs I could have picked, but if I ever stop smiling at how Robert Smith sings "hhhhoooles" I know that's that for me.