My Favorite CDs of the '90s -- An Introduction

I guess you could say that I'm coming down with a case of "listmania" (apologies to Amazon if that word is copyrighted). While putting together my ranking of my favorite CDs of the decade (coming next month!), I encountered a few titles that I was forced to omit from the list because they were released in 1999 ... so close, and yet so far away. I guess it just irked me so much to leave those few ineligible titles off that list that I thought, why not put them on a list of their own? Besides, I figure I need a good warm-up for the more time-consuming countdown next month, so a smaller one would be just the ticket. And it also helps that my strategy for ranking the albums -- lay them out on my bed in rough-sorted rows of ten, examine the track listings, deliberate for awhile, then shuffle them into the final order -- made far quicker work of both lists than I expected.

So, over the course of this month I'll be trotting out a countdown of my favorite CDs of the 1990s! (Never fear ... my obligatory two-part "Favorite Albums of the Year" podcast will arrive on schedule, right around Christmas.) Just don't take this list too seriously -- I call it "my favorite CDs" and not "the best CDs" for just that reason ... probably entertaining, perhaps enlightening, but by no means all-encompassing. So don't be disappointed or angry if you don't find any major titles on this list, like Nirvana's "Nevermind"; I just wasn't a Nirvana fan at all, and though the album is on my "pick it up eventually" list, I just haven't gotten around to buying it yet.

The 1990s were a bit of an odd decade for me, not only in terms of my music listening, but for other reasons as well, which I won't go into now. Suffice to say that If I were to draw up a graph showing my music consumption over that ten-year span, it'd look a bit like a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge: peaking at the beginning and end of the decade, with a noticeable decline in the middle. As a result, you'll see far more albums from the first couple of years and the last couple of years of the decade, and not very many from the middle years; so in that respect, the '90s felt almost like two separate decades to me. And yes, you'll see several titles from my "Early '90s Month" feature a couple of years ago crop up in this countdown, but I promise I'll try not to be too redundant.

So get ready ... the countdown starts later this week!!