Sometimes hooks are so mangled from their original form that singing along becomes impossible. As if that would prevent us from trying. To little success, we tried arching our lungs over the cut-up voice of Florence Welch here, though even met with failure it’s still lodged in our brains. The Xx resung the rest of the tune for their 2-steppy sorta cover/remix, where xylophone and harp seem like logically urbane instrument choices. Very couth, guys.

Firstly, I wanted to focus on real stand-out tracks. Therefore you’ll not see any songs from my top two albums, mainly because they’re all so good that none in particular stand out, and I couldn’t populate the list with tracks from my top five albums. I’ve also tried to avoid including particular artists more than once (I know I have, but it’s a collaboration…). But even with these rules, how do you order 50 tracks? The top 10, maybe even the top 20 follows some sort of rough merit, but after that the list pretty much stays in the same arbitrary order that I first wrote down off the top of my head. So it’s safe to say that there’s little to separate any of these songs, and if I had to do it again starting from scratch, it would probably look quite different. What you should remember is that these are all GREAT SONGS.