Starting a new long-term project here! I hope everyone enjoys it; I intend to. Tell all your friends; tell the whole bunch.

I am going to count down songs from tomorrow, November 6th, 2026, until December 31st, 2029. It’ll work like this.

Rule #1: One song per day.

Rule #2: One decade at a time; 144 songs per decade; 1950s to 2020s. The timing should put us at December 31st 2029 when we get to the #1 song of the 2020s. If something goes wrong with the timing, I’ll fix it.

Rule #3: Only one song per artist per decade!

Rule #4: No Christmas music. (That’s a different countdown.)

I will post the songs daily on matthewe.com and on Bluesky @majael.bsky.social, with YouTube links when available. Sometimes I will write something to accompany the song choice and sometimes I won’t. If I write something it might be here, on matthewe.com, or it might be on my Patreon for free or it might even be on Patreon for money every now and then. But you’ll have no trouble finding it if you look. And I’ll keep a running list of the songs on this page.

Notice that I call this a countdown and not a series of Top 144 lists. I don’t call these songs the “top” songs of their decade. I don’t call them the best songs, or the biggest hits, or my favourite songs, or the most important songs… although I do think they’re good, or even great, and I do like them a lot, and I think some of them are important. All I claim is that, if I were to be put in charge of such a countdown, these are the songs I would pick, for whatever reason.

The ranking, from #144 to #1, is not completely meaningless. In general, if I rank one song #91 and another song #92, that doesn’t mean anything. Switch ’em if you want. If I rank one #47 and another #87, then I really do intend to give the #47 song a little bit more priority. And once we get into the small numbers, they mean a bit more; I’ll ponder which song to put #5 and which one #6 a lot more carefully than I will for the #50 and #60 songs. I’ll make sure that the #1 song is one that I really want to put ahead of every other song of its decade.

It is beyond the powers of me, or of anyone, to assemble a definitive list of the most awesome songs according to their qualities. But I’m going to do the best I can to present a fun list that will be worth your time, and possibly even worth referring to.

One thing I’m hoping for is that an aesthetic will emerge from this project. Some kind of unified sound. That assembling all these songs will, through some kind of synergy, isolate a coherent mood or tone that is worth identifying, and that is not the same as what universal acceptance or eclecticism might produce. I think it might happen; I’m eager to find out.

At this writing, I’ve got the 1950s 144 pretty well plotted out and ready to go. For the rest, I’ve got enough songs lined up, but I don’t yet have the final 144s chosen and ranked. (Ideally, if I received a brand new CD for Christmas 2029 and it had a 2020s song on it that was immediately my new favourite, I’d be able to squeeze it into what was left of the countdown before New Year’s.)

You can, if you want, influence this countdown! Is there a song that
a) is wonderful, or important, or that you just love so much,
b) was first released between Jan 1 1950 and Dec 31 2029,
c) during a decade that I haven’t completely counted down yet, and
d) you’re pretty sure I don’t know?
Those are the ones I want to hear about! Drop me a line and tell it to me and I’ll give it a spin and see. It’s okay if you don’t; I already have way more candidates than I strictly need. But I do want this countdown to be as good as I can make it, so I’m not closing any doors before the calendar does it for me.

So I must be some kind of music expert, right? I am not. I am a longtime listener who reads a lot and who likes making lists. I’ve benefited a lot from friends and relatives who have recommended music to me, and from various online sources that have taught me even more. (If you think you have a guess as to where I discovered a given song, I won’t confirm or deny, but you’ve got a good chance of being right.) But I’ve never been good at keeping up with current music; I tend to look back on it in retrospect. And my tastes tend toward energetic three-minute pop songs, away from sad or harsh or dark six-minute opuses. And I do like to cast my nets widely. So if you’re into music, you’ll probably generally agree with me about the ’50s list, not disagree too strongly about the ’60s and ’70s lists, wonder what I think I’m doing when it comes to the ’80s and ’90s lists, and conclude that I’m out of my mind by the time I get to the ’00s, ’10s, and ’20s.

But that’s okay. The one thousand, one hundred fifty-two wonderful songs to come can speak for themselves, and I look forward to hearing them do so again and again.

Watch this space!