1997-2009

The artist tags that will be featured in this list are Devin Townsend, The Devin Townsend Band, and Devin Townsend Project. The ambient albums that Devin has released will not be eligible. Likewise, any bonus tracks or extras material that happens to be in Devin's catalog will not be seen here. All nine DT/DTB/DTP albums that are currently released will have their songs in this list.

I've been working on this project for eight (8) months. Back when I posted the initial thread announcing this project's beginning, the first comment I got was "Pointless." It probably very much seemed to be a futile effort, and other predictions were that I would get burnt out about halfway through. Despite a couple of hiatuses, I pushed onwards in this project. Each Devin Townsend track out of these 100 were listened to approximately 10 times each. Back to back. There were no exceptions. Songs were picked by my player's shuffle (trivia: the first song picked was "Irish Maiden" and the last song picked was "The Death of Music"), and I began to rank them as soon as I had heard one song from each album. The ranking grew and grew into what you are about to see right now.

After hearing the 100th song, I listened to all nine albums in the order that they ought to be listened to, revising my ranking into the final list that I'm about to present to you. This list is one hundred songs long, and I will be releasing multiple entries a day when possible. I invite all Devin Townsend fans and the Dev himself to enjoy my take on the music of Devin Townsend.

This ranking is that of my own personal opinion, and it is to be expected that my personal opinion doesn't match up 100% with popular opinion of Devin Townsend fans. Likewise, I would like to ask everybody to remain calm and non-threatened should a song that you really like be ranked lower than you had hoped (or if a song you really didn't like got ranked higher). Also, since this particular copy of the list is being featured on Devin Townsend's own forum, I would like to personally say two things to him: Thank you so much for making this an incredible experience; you have become my favorite artist as a result of this entire process. The other thing I want to say is that I hope you are not in any way offended by the placement of these tracks. Even songs that have ranked in the 80s and 90s are songs that I like very much, and likewise, putting certain songs that low was a real challenge for me. I hope you enjoy this list and take as much joy away from reading this as I did listening to your music.

With that, let's get started. I will be posting one to two entries at a time, but for the first one, I will be posting the first ten. That's rankings 100 to 91. I figure this will be a good starter for discussion and a good kickoff for the festivities ahead! I will be posting the beginning entries in approximately one hour or so from now.

Enjoy friends.

-Vito

P.S. - I greatly encourage discussion, comment, and prediction from any who are interested!
P.P.S. - For organization and preservation, all entries posted will, after being debuted here, be found at the below link:

http://rateyourmusic.com/list/VitomusGe ... end_songs_
06/30/2010 update: 100-65 up.

(ALL OPINIONS ARE VALID AS OF 06/27/2010. SHOULD OPINIONS PERSONALLY CHANGE, THIS LIST WILL PROBABLY NOT BE UPDATED.)

Alright guys. There's the very start of this. As you may have noticed, there is not going to be any negativity in my explanations. (This is a fairly easy thing to do, of course, considering the music I'm reviewing.)

I encourage discussion about what's been posted so far. Some people would complain about wanting all of the posts to be adjacent, but I say 'fuck that'. I'm cool with anyone and everyone saying whatever they'd like while I'm taking my breaks. Obviously I'm not going to rush this list, as I want it to be a kind of fun experience for everybody.

As you also might have noticed, the link I provided at the top (which houses and logs all of these writeups) has the next submission's album art. The album art has been provided as a clue of sorts to those who might be wondering what is coming next. I will only have one album art displayed in advance, though.

Anyway, I'm going to relax for a little while. Maybe watch some TV. I've been listening to Devin in preparation for this all day and I need a little breather. I might post a couple more writeups later.

Take care for now.

-Vito

Cool, cool. Reminds me of something I was planning to do a while back (and probably will still do one day) for some friends. Nice input on the songs. I couldn't help but giggle when you said all 100 DT songs since I have 356 but that's my own fault for obsessing so much lol.

Cool, cool. Reminds me of something I was planning to do a while back (and probably will still do one day) for some friends. Nice input on the songs. I couldn't help but giggle when you said all 100 DT songs since I have 356 but that's my own fault for obsessing so much lol.

356?! I would love to see a list of them. XD

I still have quite a bit of Dev to get. I got the Ass-Sordid demos and the Infinity/Christeen EP though (the tracks from those won't be featured on the list since I didn't have time to let them absorb like I did with these ones).

Ah, the Christeen EP is really great. I like it better than Infinity actually (probably considered hate speech by some die-hards but what can I say, it's not his strongest work to me). Ass-Sordid Demos is really great to hear too.

Well a fair bit of my 365 are SYL; I've got them on the same playlist. But I do have 222 dt ones. I copied and pasted the list into a text document if you wanna see it, I attached it.

Edit: Weird you can't upload .txts here. Here you go

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=137J1KY9

Awesome. Looking forward to viewing this.

To everyone that views and comments on this thread inbetween now and my return, I will see you all tomorrow for more submissions!

-Vito

[swervedriver]

Some people would complain about wanting all of the posts to be adjacent, but I say 'fuck that'. I'm cool with anyone and everyone saying whatever they'd like while I'm taking my breaks.

What I'm wondering is why your opinion should have its own separate topic to begin with (when there's plenty of other "Your top Dev tracks" topics around, with additional discussion) and every song ranking explained in a separate post. Seems overly space-consuming when you're essentially 10-tuple posting.

As for discussing your opinion.. I'll probably wait until you've posted your entire list, see what I feel differently about, read your reasoning and think "hmm ok, if you feel that way". I don't think personal opinions/preferences leave a lot of room for fruitful discussion anyway. Hope you had fun doing your ranking in any case.

Some people would complain about wanting all of the posts to be adjacent, but I say 'fuck that'. I'm cool with anyone and everyone saying whatever they'd like while I'm taking my breaks.

What I'm wondering is why your opinion should have its own separate topic to begin with (when there's plenty of other "Your top Dev tracks" topics around, with additional discussion) and every song ranking explained in a separate post. Seems overly space-consuming when you're essentially 10-tuple posting.

I agree. It's fine that you put so much thought in your opinion, and you've put so much effort into making a top-100, but dedicating an entire thread to it, and one-post-per-song, that's just stupid.

Besides, it's all going to be on that rateyourmusic thing as well, so maybe you should just link us there when it's done?

Well the only reason that writeups are rather small and don't have room for discussion is because we're still at the bottom of the list. When we get even just a little bit farther in, I'm going to have a lot more to say. And I don't want this thread to be just for my opinion; I want to spark and encourage discussion about this. I made two separate threads while preparing this just to make sure that this WOULDN'T end up being locked or something. An admin said that I can post my findings in a Best Of thread, and while the thread he linked to only had a Top 5, I really wanted to go above and beyond. I know it seems like a lot, but I really like writing. It would all be contained in this thread, and the boards are kind of slow lately anyway, so...would it really be hurting anybody?

Not to mention, the reason I'm posting them here in posts too is because I'm debuting them here, then putting them into the RYM list. If I had them all in that link, people wouldn't really pay much attention to it and there wouldn't be anything up front to discuss. Lastly, I've really put a lot of time into it and the only other place that this is being seen (RYM) couldn't give two shits; since this is where the other Devin Townsend fans reside, I figured this would be more acceptable.

More write-ups coming up now.

As you all can see, the list is going pretty fast. A fifth of the way done in only about 15 hours? Despite my wish to take my time a little bit more, I'm really enjoying watching all of my time spent over these months materialized into something worth talking about.

Anyway, it's time for another break. Looking forward to comment!

-Vito

[djskrimp]

Actively cleaning up this thread. Standby for unlock and explanation.

Explanation: You have a site that says what you need it to say. People can click on it and read what you have to say. Posting a post about each song is an exercise in ego. We have one ego on this board; Devin's. If people want to quote what you wrote on your site, cool. But do not put a post for each song in this thread or any other. It smacks of post whore.

Alright. Enjoy the link. Feel free to discuss its contents.

-Vito

Liking the top 100 list so far man although there are some songs I really love as low as in the 80s! But hey, I don't think I could do something like that even though I really am the sort of person who likes to put things in order. .. It's just that with Devin's songs, I don't know! There's so much stuff I like and it depends on so many things, the mood you have can make a song either perfect or unlistenable if you know what I mean. Good luck with finishing it though, I'm looking forward to seeing the choices closer to the top.

Actually slightly surprised that you have fantastic songs like Dynamics and Terminal as low as that... But as I said, gotta be hard with Dev songs!

I just might put together a bit smaller list of my favourite Devin songs but we'll see if I can do it.

Yeah, I apologize for ones like that being so low. I know that it's painful for some people to see their favorites be so low. Back when I did a Porcupine Tree list in a similar fashion (top 60), I excluded a few songs altogether that were beloved to most but not so much to me, including "Even Less" and "Dark Matter". Oh boy, did I ever get some responses for that. I was even called a troll for it. XD

I would say that about half of the most controversial picks have already been outed at least. There are a couple more, but once we get over 50 and lower, I think there's no way anybody will be disappointed.

Yeah, I hear ya. I've been checking this every day now, I think it's pretty interesting to compare the views different people have about all these songs. I agree with you on a lot of thinks you write about the songs but at the same time I'm pretty sure my own list would be quite different. But that's no surprise when you are literally putting 100 songs in some kind of order of preference. I doubt you'd find many people who would have a same kind of list. Music is just so different to everyone somehow.

I can kinda guess which songs will be at the top though. If your taste is anything like mine, it'll be the epics, stuff like Deadhead, Bastard, Earth Day... But apparently also lots of Addicted material (and AE)