Top 300 Tracks of My 30s
Poem + Shortlisted Tracks + Tracks 300 – 201 | Feb 4, 2025
Tracks 200 – 101 | Feb 6, 2025
Tracks 100 – 1 | Feb 8, 2025
A decade is not a clean break. It bleeds. It carries forward the unresolved, the unfinished, the unshaken. When I turned 30, I thought I had a grip on who I was. When I turned 40, I realized I had only been guessing. In between, there were songs, many, many songs. Some were anthems I played too loud in cars that don’t exist anymore. Some were quiet, threading themselves through sleepless nights and long, uncertain mornings. Some cracked me open; some put me back together.
This playlist is not just a list of songs I liked—it’s the music that scored the last decade of my life, the ones that made sense when not much else did.
To commemorate the last ten years of music curation, I wrote a poem and ranked a complete list of my top 300 songs, along with a shortlist of 30 more that nearly made the cut. May you find something familiar, something forgotten, or something waiting to be heard for the first time.
Note: My 30s spanned from January 2015 to January 2025. Each year during that decade, I compiled a playlist of the music that pulled me in the most. Last year, I began assembling this list of 300—piecing together, shuffling, and organizing based on the songs that carried the deepest emotional weight. I was careful to honor the music that found me in my early 30s, even if it faded from rotation later on. This list is shaped by feeling, memory, place, and ecclesiastical affections.
Procession
By Brian Murnion
I did not choose these songs,
they arrived like stray dogs,
silent at first,
then demanding a place by the fire
some were kind and stayed the night,
some scratched at the door until morning,
some whispered of cities I had yet to visit,
and hands I once held too loosely
now they stand in a long procession,
three hundred faces turned toward me,
waiting for a name,
but I have only silence to give them
30 Shortlisted
In no particular order. Apple Music playlist link at the bottom.
Margaret – Lana Del Rey
Reflections After Jane – The Clientele
Retrograde – James Blake
The Pure and the Damned (feat. Iggy Pop) – Oneohtrix Point Never
And I’d go a thousand miles – Montell Fish
A Day In The Life – The Beatles
Crockett’s Theme – Jan Hammer
When a Fire Starts To Burn – Disclosure
Nobody Hangs Out Anymore – London O’Connor
Without Words – Joseph of Mercury
Sports Man – Haruomi Hosono
Inside Out – Spoon
Beyond Love – Beach House
Your Flesh Against Mine – Dillon
Same Drugs – Chance the Rapper
Song for You – Alexi Murdoch
Early to the Party – Andy Shauf
What If – Coldplay
Mind Games – John Lennon
Friday on My Mind – The Easybeats
Decades – Joy Division
Elephant Woman – Blonde Redhead
If I Should Lose You – Nina Simone
Bigger Than Life – Lil Uzi Vert
Return – Eno, Hyde
Pink Sun – The Field
Road to Somewhere – Goldfrapp
Radiovoice – Good Morning
Jump Into the Fire – Harry Nilsson
