My 200 Favorite Songs of All Time

At the end of last year, this site rounded the corner on 150 total articles published. Once I hit that milestone, it immediately felt as if my 200th article loomed right around the corner. I had started to post more regularly than ever before, and running this website felt like a relatively healthy hobby to commit to during a global pandemic. At the onset of this year, I also made a resolution to post at least one article a week throughout 2021, and I’m proud to say I’ve kept that up all year, more or less. 

Also around this same time, I hatched a grand idea for my 200th article on this site to be a ranking of my top 200 songs of all time. I wanted to do full-paragraph write-ups for each song, articulating exactly what I loved about them on both a personal and musical level. I tried to start that piece a few times over the last year, but the idea was simply too overwhelming for me even to begin to genuinely chip away at.

However, what I have done over the last year is create an iTunes playlist of all my favorite songs. I’ve been updating and scrutinizing this list with some level of regularity, so it feels like a relatively complete reflection of who I am in 2021. Obviously, I couldn’t quite find the time to write about all 200 tracks, but I realized that if I was going to have them all collected somewhere, I might as well make it somewhere public. 

This isn’t a traditional post where I wax poetic for thousands of words. Instead, I celebrate Swim Into The Sound’s 200th post in a manner that’s very un-like Swim Into The Sound. At the bottom of this article, you’ll find a Spotify playlist featuring 200 of my favorite songs of all time... Err, well, more like 198 of my favorite songs, because neither “Weak Man, Weak Boy” or “Waltz of the Sea Wolf” are on Spotify. This playlist is in “reverse chronological order,” with my favorite songs up top. While I’m listing asterisks, I’d also like to caution that this playlist gets decidedly less ranked as it goes on. 

If you’re interested in reading about some of these songs in more detail, I wrote about my fifteen favorites back in 2019 for the site’s 100th post. That article approaches the topic in a manner that’s more befitting of this blog; long adoration-filled paragraphs about pieces of music that are very near and dear to my heart.

Even though this post is not the ornate 200-song-long write-up I first envisioned, it’s is still a celebration. Two hundred articles is a monumental achievement in my mind because it just feels so big–each hundred does. I still remember naming my first document in Google Drive and using the format “001” because I thought I would never pass 1,000. It’s not like I’m close now, but I at least understand what that quantity feels like.

This is also a celebration because I genuinely believe in everything that gets posted here. I have poured unquantifiable hours into each of the 199 posts that proceeded this one. This blog may seem amateurish or overly earnest at times, but it’s genuine to me, and that’s what I care about most. 

So thank you for reading this. Thank you if you’ve ever read Swim Into The Sound before, and thank you even more if you read the site regularly. 

Thank you if you’ve contributed to the site as a guest writer, said something nice on social media, or worked with me in any capacity. It all adds up, and every single piece of support means the world to me.

Running this site is genuinely one of the highlights of my life, and I thank you for being a part of it.

Thank you for coming along, and thank you for caring.