The one in which I come clean with my truly provincial taste in music

I have a twisted relationship with all things listicle. My painfully linear brain likes anything ordered and numbered and easily classified, but the music fan in me knows what a Herculean task it is rank one's favorite records. Not to mention that most best-ofs are rip-offs of last year's best-of with current darlings added.

But I'm hypocrite. And a sheep. So I added my ballot to Pitchfork's People's List.

I realize I'm probably far outside Pitchfork's target audience. Wearing my age on my sleeve, I didn't try to be cool, filling up my list with obscure bands for whom even the too-hip-for-the-room twenty-somethings writing for Pitchfork would approve. I didn't pick records that "should" make the list (no OK Computer anywhere to be seen), but forty albums from the last fifteen years that meant a lot to me, or spoke to me, or altered what I think good music is supposed to be.

The top five are pretty accurate; the rest I filled in arbitrarily. Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is kind of an obvious choice, and I think it's just strange enough that it doesn't smack of any particular era anymore. It has a good, probably now-forgotten story surrounding it (dropped from the original label, went on to score gold status, blah blah blah) along with the weird conspiracy theory that it somehow predicted 9/11 with songs like "Ashes of American Flags," and the "towers" cover. I Am a Bird Now is just gorgeous and I never tire of it, even half-a-decade later. Rufus Wainwright, I could have picked any of his, but Want One is the album I'd want as the soundtrack to my life. Stereo renewed my interest in all things Replacements and laid the foundation for comeback of sorts for Paul Westerberg. Lucinda Williams's Car Wheels on a Gravel Road inspired many a bad karaoke, and I still love her for it. In other words, I chose albums solely for their nostalgic value. I'm pretty okay with that.

The only "rule" I adhered to was to limit one entry per artists. I'm an all-or-nothing fan, so I could have easily listed four Rufus Wainwright record, three of Lucinda's, and so on. Narrowing down 15 years of music to twenty or forty or even one hundred records is harder than it seems, and the late 90s and early 00s are a little over-represented, given that I'm probably at least a decade older than the average Pitchfork reader.