Top 300 Tracks of My 30s

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.