My 40th birthday is this week on Dec. 3. As part of my reflections on the four decades of life I’ve lived to this point, I do what I often do. I created a playlist. The 40-song playlist includes one song from each of the 40 years I have been alive. I chose songs not just because they were released in that year, but because each has some sort of significance in my life.
Music has an unusual capacity for encapsulating moments in time. We hear a song and it conjures a memory. We listen to an album for the first time in 25 years, and it takes us back to high school.
As I put together this playlist, I revisited memories I hadn’t thought about in years. I reflected on how my tastes have changed and wondered about why, in certain seasons in my life, certain types of music resonated more. All in all, it was a wonderful exercise. I recommend it for your next milestone birthday!
Below are the 40 songs on the playlist, with brief notes on the song’s inclusion.
1982: “El-Shaddai,” Amy Grant. Amy Grant was a fixture in the 80s evangelicalism of my childhood. If I recall, we sang this song in our church’s children’s choir.
1983: “40,” by U2. Included for obvious reasons.
1984: “Born in the U.S.A.” Bruce Springsteen. Patriotism figured prominently in my upbringing in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This Springsteen anthem captures it well.
1985: “Just Like Honey,” by Jesus and Mary Chain. Included not because I loved the song at the time (toddlers don’t gravitate to post-punk shoegaze), but because it became one of my favorite 80s songs later in life. Thank you, Sofia Coppola (IYKYK).
1986: “In Your Eyes,” Peter Gabriel. I got really into Peter Gabriel in my 20s, and this song is one of my favorites. Gabriel wrote it after an impactful trip to Barcelona’s La Sagrada Familia cathedral, which is also one of the most inspiring places I’ve ever visited.
1987: “In God’s Country,” by U2. One of my favorite U2 songs, from the album (Joshua Tree) I didn’t fully appreciate until I moved to Southern California and visited Joshua Tree National Park for the first time in 2005.
1988: “If I Stand,” by Rich Mullins. I think I was first introduced to this song later in life, through Jars of Clay’s cover, but I loved Rich Mullins in the late 80s and 90s.
1989: “Plainsong,” The Cure. One of the best 80s songs. The liturgical name fits the song’s grandiose, cathedral-filling, echoey wall of sound. It’s the sort of soaring, transcendence-seeking rock music I love.
1990: “Ice Ice Baby,” Vanilla Ice. I spent a lot of time at roller skating rinks in the early 90s, and when I think of roller skating rinks, I think of this song. All these years later, the beat still slaps.
1991: “Lithium,” Nirvana. Kurt Cobain and Nirvana t-shirts were everywhere in my 4th grade class—a rather disturbing thought in retrospect. Even still, the face-melting grunge anthems on Nevermind set the trajectory for my generation’s post-80s musical coming of age.
1992: “Lean on Me,” DC Talk. Before they were the “Christian Nirvana” (see their masterpiece album, Jesus Freak), DC Talk were Christian hip hop pioneers. I could sing along to every word of their “Lean on Me” cover, including the rap portions (True MC, True MC / Everybody listens to the True MC…).
1993: “Mr Jones,” Counting Crows. I have a very distinct memory of Justin, the coolest kid in 5th grade, playing a guitar and singing this song at the annual school talent show.
1994: “Water Runs Dry,” Boyz II Men. Boyz II Men’s II was the first secular CD I owned. When I think about my first Discman portable CD player, this is the CD I remember.
1995: “Love Song for a Savior,” by Jars of Clay. Jars of Clay’s debut album was a game-changer for Christian music, combining a quality alternative music aesthetic with meaningful, often beautiful lyrics. This song was a standout; I remember listening to it in my headphones constantly.
1996: “Walk on Water,” Audio Adrenaline. Some of my earliest rock concerts were Audio Adrenaline concerts, and boy were they fun. Of all the great tracks from the masterpiece album, Bloom, this was my favorite.
1997: “I’ll Be Missing You,” Puff Daddy. Puff Daddy and the Bad Boy Family will always bring to mind high school. In addition to being musically synonymous with the era of TRL and Abercrombie, this song is a musically rich (that Police sample!), fitting memorial for the late Notorious B.I.G.
1998: “Intergalactic,” Beastie Boys. This song’s sick beat still holds up. A late-90s banger that brings to mind memories of high school dances.
1999: “Everyone’s Beautiful,” Waterdeep. In high school I was obsessed with the hippy-ish organic folk of Waterdeep. It was a period when I started to get disillusioned with Christian music and its overwhelmingly derivative quality. The titular track from Everyone’s Beautiful is up there among my favorite Christian recordings of all time.
2000: “Everything in its Right Place,” Radiohead. I remember picking up Kid A in the CD section at Best Buy on Quivira in Lenexa, Kansas. I played it in my Mercury Cougar on the drive home, and woah. This song. This album. For me, it’s the Terrence Malick of music. Like The Thin Red Line, it gave me a vision for how “secular” art can capture spiritual transcendence. At the turn of the millennium, “Everything in its Right Place” was a sort of call to worship for a post-Christian but God-haunted new century.
2001: “New Slang,” The Shins. Before Garden State made the song emblematic of indie music’s aughts ascendency (“it will change your life”), I remember it as the soundtrack of my first semester of college.
2002: “NYC,” Interpol. I’ll always associate Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights with the post-9/11 mood, as well as the NYC-centric rise of hipsterdom in the early 2000s. I saw Interpol play this song live a few times and it was epic.
2003: “Jesus in New Orleans,” Over the Rhine. Over the Rhine became my favorite band in college and for most of my 20s, and their double-album masterpiece, Ohio, remains among my favorite albums ever. Karin and Linford played “Jesus in New Orleans” at my all-time favorite concert: Schubas Tavern in Chicago (fall 2003).
2004: “Seven Swans,” Sufjan Stevens. Sufjan’s arrival on the indie scene was a turning point for Christians like me looking for a higher bar of quality in faith-informed music. The title track from Seven Swans is musically and devotionally exhilarating.
2005: “Baby We’ll Be Fine,” The National. Most millennials of a certain age and disposition went through a phase where The National spoke to them and captured their quarter-life acedia (“I put on an argyle sweater and put on a smile”). That was me in my post-college years, particularly this song.
2006: “Mr. Me Too,” Clipse. It might surprise some that I’m a Clipse fan—particularly 2006’s Hell Hath No Fury, from which this Pharrell-produced single emerged. But I can’t resist such skillfully constructed beats!
2007: “Intervention,” Arcade Fire. Arcade Fire has recently been cancelled due to misconduct allegations against Win Butler, but 15 years ago they were icons of peak hipsterdom. This organ-infused track from Neon Bible is one of many rousing anthems of that millennial mix of institutional cynicism and spiritual earnestness.
2008: “Strawberry Swing,” Coldplay. I’ll always remember listening to this on a solo trip to the UK, sitting in a bus from London to Oxford in the summer of 2008—listening in my headphones as the green hills of rural England passed outside my window.
2009: “My Girls,” Animal Collective. I went through a hipster-adjacent phase in my mid-20s, and this incredible song will forever evoke that era of my life. If aughts-era Brooklyn could be bottled up into sonic form, it would be this song.
2010: “Runaway,” Kanye West feat. Pusha T. From Ye’s best album, back in the halcyon days when he was (slightly) less troubled. An astonishingly good song, with a beautiful music video too.
2011: “Holocene,” Bon Iver. When I think of the early days of dating Kira, I think of Bon Iver. We bonded over music like Bon Iver. Pretty sure this song was on a few mix CDs I made for her (we still did that in 2011!).
2012: “I Will Wait,” Mumford and Sons. One of our earliest concert together was Mumford and Sons in San Pedro, and songs like “I Will Wait” were incredible live.
2013: “Don’t Hold the Wall,” Justin Timberlake. JT’s 20/20 Experience came out a few weeks before our wedding. We played this song in the car as we drove away after our sparkler exit, and it was the album of our honeymoon. To this day when I listen to it, I’m instantly transported to the white sand beaches of Turks & Caicos.
2014: “Parade,” The Antlers. A standout track from The Antlers’ best overall album. The song’s unexpected deployment of a solitary f-word—in the first line—is a memorable and effective example of when sparingly used profanity can be powerful.
2015: “Fourth of July,” Sufjan Stevens. An exquisite gem that manages to assert human finitude (“We’re all gonna die” is repeated dozens of times) in the most life-affirming way. I’ll forever associate this song, and the larger Carrie & Lowell album, with Kira and me driving along the Oregon coast on a roadtrip.
2016: “Blessings,” Chance the Rapper. Rare is the hip hop song that celebrates faith and gratitude to God, in the coolest possible way. This song got heavy rotation in my Summer 2016 playlist.
2017: “Thinking of a Place,” The War on Drugs. From the first glimmering bars of reverberating keys, to the epic guitar solo at the 3-minute mark, this 8-minute opus always has us thinking of a place and time. It is one of those songs Kira and I will hold in our hearts forever.
2018: “Lost in Time and Space,” Lord Huron. I remember driving on the Pacific Coast Highway in Corona Del Mar one summer evening at sunset, listening to this song and feeling that “all is well” feeling music so frequently fosters.
2019: “Closer Than a Brother,” Josh Garrels. Garrels was a key part of the 2010s renaissance in indie Christian music, and this song—musically interesting and deeply worshipful—is a good example of why.
2020: “Psalm 1,” Poor Bishop Hooper. Released a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic, this joyful rendition of my favorite psalm became an anthem of grounded hope in our household, in a very difficult year.
2021: “First Love,” Young Oceans. When I first heard this song, I wept. The poetic, mysterious-yet-worshipful lyrics, combined with an Eno-esque synth ambience, felt like an aesthetic made for me. Contemporary Christian music has come a long way since “El Shaddai.”