oh damn, you're right

Terria is and will always remain as Townsend's best album, so I'd rank the tracks from Terria from 1-10

Hey guys, Bend It Like Bender! got knocked out at 22.

It's a different song you are overlooking. ^_^

Damn, we're ignorant.
This is exactly what I was talking about when I said 100 songs is just too many to rank

i would definitely not have Addicted in his top ten songs, let alone top 4. earth day and deadhead are obvious choices for the top part of the list though

I'm not sure about the order but my top 10 would propably include stuff like:

Deadhead, Deep Peace, Earth Day, Death of Music, Hyperdrive, Color Your World, Ki, Terminal, Bastard, Triumph...... And fuck it, that's 10 songs and I forgot about Infinity Phycisist completely... Love stuff like Unity, Noisy Pink Bubbles, Christeen, Kingdom for sure as well... Simply too many great songs to pick from. EXTREMELY hard to put in order.

Also, one funny thing is that I'm a huge fan of Ki and actually one of my favourite things out of those sessions would be Synchronity Freaks but it's not even on the album! But daaamn that song is goooooood.

I agree with you. I had to be very attentive in my ranking as I made it, often moving songs up and down by the day. It definitely was no easy task. Even now, there are some songs I would put higher than I've already placed them, just for spending more time with them. The list preserves how I feel about Devin music in this given time, though, which I think is cool.

Just a quick heads up...I doubt that many people are really truly waiting for the results, but should anybody, I apologize that the final four hasn't yet been put up. College stuff has reared its head and I've had to take care of it. My write-up for 4 has begun, but I might just bang them all out by tonight. Here's to hoping I find that gap. If not tonight, tomorrow.

I'm unpacked and moved in; finally I can reveal the end to you. #4 going up now, #3 #2 #1 coming later today. Enjoy.

Excellent!

I like what you wrote about Deadhead. Pretty damn spot-on, I would say

It is finished. Thank you all for reading. I'll stick around in the thread if there's any questions or whatnot (not that there's much insightful I could say. XD), but I hope you all enjoyed (you too, Devin, though I wouldn't be offended if you were too busy between shows and recording. Thanks for an incredible experience.)

Well... nobody saw that one coming xD

Not my way around (ie. DEEP PEACE!!!) but a very thorough and well thought out list. Very cool.

Addicted surprised me, but that's just my opinion.
Life and Earth Day were well deserved.

Thank you for putting Devin's music in my ears all the time during my lunch break while reading through your blog

Interesting choices, I was blown away by "Addicted" as well when I heard it first... I still love it but you can't compare it to the musical greatness and epicness of stuff like deadhead, deep peace, the greys and many more - in my opinion.

Yeah, I struggled to pick a favorite from the top 3, as they were all at the same level for the longest time. I even had Deadhead as a contender for number one for a little while. I finally realized that "Addicted!" was just completely its own brand of absolute craziness and that I had to set it apart, even though "Life" and "Earth Day" fought for their lives. My Porcupine Tree list in 2008 ended kinda similarly ("Prodigal" was my number one, which made the forum I was on a little pissed [at my mere opinion, for who knows what reason -_-])

[swervedriver]

What I find interesting about the list is the trouble you've gone through for sorting the lower half of the songs. Top 10 is all fine and dandy except for maybe Addicted which in my own personal, humble and mostly unimportant opinion has no place there. But with the sorting of all these songs I think there is one major problem: you're breaking up an album which has a flow or narrative into bite-sized chunks (songs) which by themselves lose the special something that makes them work so well in album context. I mean, it's no wonder to find Tall Latte, Omnidimensional Creator, ZTO, 3AM and such in the lowest regions because by themselves they are relatively uninteresting pieces, mostly serving as intros (or outros) to more epic songs. In the same vein, most of the songs in the upper region are all singles or are able to stand completely on their own without any need for album context to enhance them or give them extra meaning or something.

I guess I look at the Devin discography not consisting as just songs, but viewing the albums as one entity each. *pompous tw@t alert!* This is obvious for an album like Ziltoid which blatantly is telling a story, but also works very well for albums like Infinity, Ki and Synchestra where the sum is much greater than its parts. Physicist, Accelerated Evolution and Addicted are much more single-song-oriented, and I consider Ocean Machine and Terria to be a mix of both. With that in mind I think your ranking of all songs is pretty logical and my list might end up not even that different from yours, putting the "singles" at the top and the songs requiring context (+ half of Physicist) towards the bottom.

But in that way you can't really make a fair judgment of all the songs since the albums are so varied in style. On a further personal note I think trying to take an objective approach to something subjective isn't going to work, but you already admit that yourself that this list is essentially a snapshot ("ALL OPINIONS ARE VALID AS OF 06/27/2010. SHOULD OPINIONS PERSONALLY CHANGE, THIS LIST WILL PROBABLY NOT BE UPDATED."), albeit one with a long shutter time. I'll illustrate this by saying that one day I'll prefer hearing something introspective and calm like Terminal, and the next I want nothing more than bouncing around to Namaste. Having listened to all songs 10 times isn't going to change that. To say you want to have such a snapshot is admirable, but in my still personal, humble and mostly unimportant opinion it's a lot of fucking work for one photo.


To end this seemingly-self-important whinefest that is this post I'll end it on a more comical note. *ahem* I think your number 1 is totally wrong. The best Devin Townsend song is Bohemian Rhapsody because that song is #1 in all lists.

That would have been too cliche of a pick; I considered letting Kashmir be my number one pick as well.