And one level abstracted, the process does say something about me to me. Some years, making the list has required torturous iterations. I have sometimes tried to make it answer unasked and unaskable questions. I have had too-empty years, and tried to disguise them as full using a handful of names and numbers, which is both unconvincing and hard. My 2003 could hardly have been more eventful. Very little of it had to do with music, and absolutely none of it had to do with numbering music. This year, everything here changed except for the music. My top ten list does not, even to me, tell the story of my year, nor do I wish it did. I don't need my life quantified, and music is its own justification. Possibly music is happiest left to be nothing but its own justification. These lists are always meaningless, and we make them as a way of crossing over, once a year, into a universe where the hardest problems are this easy. Solving imaginary easy problems used to make me feel better, used to be a comfort I thought I needed. Maybe that means my stubborn self-imposed labor of relating to music this way, my vigil of listening this way, is almost complete, or incomplete but still over. If this year the list is easy, maybe next year it will be moot. Or maybe beyond easy is something new. I don't know yet. Here's what it sounded like in the last year before I found out.