All-time favourite songs

[Bloopy]

There's been many a thread around UM for listing or ranking albums, so songs seem a tad neglected by comparison. Post a few of your all-time favourite songs (metal or non-metal) so we can see if we can hear what the fuss is.

Or are you the sort of person whose favourite songs have changed completely every time you think about the topic? I keep mine in a ranked order, practically set in stone as it's rare for another song to make it onto the list. Though ranking songs is a lot more difficult than ranking albums and I'm not totally certain about the order.

I tend to favour either catchy songs or long/slow/brooding ones. So far the 1990s have given me the biggest haul of fav songs, with the 80s being the runner up. I suppose catchy songs became a lot less important (at least in metal) as recording got cheaper and bands no longer had to get a record exec's attention with a potential hit just to get the budget to record at all.

 

[SonOfNun]

I tend to listen to albums so I haven't given this a lot of thought. I'm not sure I could ever make a list of Top 25 favorite songs or something like that. How did you go about trying to rank songs across genres, etc.?

Here are a few starting from the top:

Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath
Black Sabbath - Hand of Doom
Black Sabbath - Sweet Leaf

 

[Bloopy]

It's a challenge alright. I gauge how much each song makes me feel enjoyment/excitement/other desirable emotional connections such as nostalgia. But listening to full songs back to back makes comparison too difficult as feelings wane when the first song fades out. So I fast forward into each song and listen to snippets at various points, sometimes flicking back and forth between the two. It may sound silly, but I find it's a swift and effective head to head song duel.

At some point I should rank my faves from scratch again and then reconcile the differences vs my original ranking to refine it.

Anyway, here's a few from my top 20:
Killing Joke - Millennium
Plasmatics - Mistress of Taboo
Night Sun - Got a Bone of My Own

Black Sabbath - Wicked World is up there too.

 

[CiG]

Cool idea. On rateyourmusic I've been slowly working on a favourite 10 singles per year list, that's completely non-metal though.

 

[Bloopy]

The primary idea of the thread was just to post a few songs, but any rankings are interesting to see. I've kept tabs on my fav songs since like 20 years ago when I got an mp3 discman and picked songs to fit on one disc. That turned into a playlist for work, and then when to use Last.fm's 'loved tracks' feature.

It's too bad RYM doesn't have a more compact list format for listing songs.

 

[Bloopy]

At some point I should rank my faves from scratch again and then reconcile the differences vs my original ranking to refine it.

Done and this is the ridiculous list now. I did more listening to the full songs as opposed to mostly snippets - radical, I know. Now the ranking of this goofy, moody, loony, Bloopy stuff seems reasonably robust. Hardly any extreme metal tracks appeal to me on quite this level, but who knows, maybe in another decade my taste will be less lame.