This is a list exercise that has made the blog rounds of late. I discovered it via Steve Hyden of the AV Club Blog, who in turn picked it up from Idolator. The premise is simple: list your favourite album for every year you've been alive.

There are a couple different ways to go about this, with the most obvious being choosing what your favourite album from a given year is now, but a different way would be to try and recollect what your favourite album was then (at least for years where you were old enough to have an opinion). I'm choosing the "favourite album now" way to go, since I think it's more interesting posting opinions I can defend now, as opposed to ones where I can just say, "What do you want from me? I was a kid". That said, in years where I didn't have a strong favourite, or needed a tiebreaker, I chose albums that defined the year for me at the time.

So here's the list, with some thoughts about how it all shaped up to follow:

• 1977 Television - Marquee Moon
• 1978 Ramones - Road to Ruin
• 1979 The Clash - London Calling
• 1980 Joy Division - Closer
• 1981 Joan Jett & the Blackhearts - Bad Reputation
• 1982 Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes
• 1983 The Cure - Japanese Whispers
• 1984 The Smiths - The Smiths
• 1985 The Smiths - Meat is Murder
• 1986 The Smiths - The Queen is Dead
• 1987 The Smiths - Strangeways, Here We Come
• 1988 Pixies - Surfer Rosa
• 1989 Pixies - Doolittle
• 1990 Public Enemy - Fear of a Black Planet
• 1991 Nirvana - Nevermind
• 1992 Neil Young - Harvest Moon
• 1993 Wu-Tang Clan - Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
• 1994 Nas - Illmatic
• 1995 Radiohead - The Bends
• 1996 Belle & Sebastian - If You're Feeling Sinister
• 1997 Radiohead - OK Computer
• 1998 Belle & Sebastian - The Boy with the Arab Strap
• 1999 The Flaming Lips - Soft Bulletin
• 2000 Aimee Mann - Bachelor No. 2
• 2001 Death Cab for Cutie - The Photo Album
• 2002 Tegan and Sara - If It Was You
• 2003 Kathleen Edwards - Failer
• 2004 Arcade Fire - Funeral
• 2005 The Decemberists - Picaresque
• 2006 The Decemberists - The Crane Wife
• 2007 The National - Boxer
• 2008 Flight of the Conchords - Flight of the Conchords

My process for putting the list together was as follows: first, I sorted my iTunes player by year in reverse, then looked at each year from 1977 on. I cross-referenced these dates with Wikipedia's lists of albums released per year (like this one for 1977), to make sure my albums weren't mistagged by year (some were). If a year had an obvious winner, then I wrote it down and moved on. If it had a few different contenders, I wrote them all down and listened to them to make the hard choice (ties are for sissies). The most difficult were for years where no particular favourite emerged. That's when I'd reconsult the Wikipedia lists to see if there was an album from that time period that I'd previously enjoyed (or had a few songs on it that I enjoyed), but didn't have in iTunes. I then downloaded those contenders and picked a winner. Oh, and only actual albums were eligible, no compilations (otherwise 1988 would've been Joy Division's Substance, and it wouldn't have been close).