My Personal Subjectively Objective Ranking of My Top 25 Albums of All-Time

Recently I’ve been feeling very musically…inspired. I thought - you know what? I want to share this list with the world. I like to think I have pretty awesome taste in music. At the very least it’s eclectic. Will there be some surprises? Maybe…Was I surprised? Sure.

What will you find in this list of albums? Just about everything. It has Jazz. It has Funk. It has Rap. A Movie Soundtrack. A Country album. A Holiday album. Rock. And of course, two Rock Operas. It encompasses music from 1965 all the way through 2022. Men. Women. Songwriters. Instrumentalists. Raging beats. Slow ballads. It’s all here. Most of it is sentimental in some way, shape or form to me. So if nothing else, you can at least glean a deeper understanding of me as a musical person.

Rules:

The ultimate list includes: 18 individual Albums by 18 Artists, and 7 additional artists whose anthologies were selected for inclusion. More on that later.

The list will be revealed in rank order. Spoiler: the top 5 includes 3 Albums and 2 Artists.

Albums and Artists were scored on the following:

How much do I like my favorite track on the album? 16 points

How did/does this album influence my own taste in music overall? 16 points

Does this album hold up since its release? 16 points

What percentage of the album do I listen to? 10 points

What did/do the critics think of this album? 10 points

What is the sentimental value to me of the album? 16 points

What was the artists involvement of the production of the album - songwriting, instrumentals, vocals, uniqueness? 16 points

Overall Rating out of 100 points

When looking at Anthologies of the 7 Artists selected - mostly because they are so much my absolute favorites I couldn’t pick just one, I rated all of their albums and took the top 4 from each to create my true cream of the crop list. 4 was the only fair number here - all artists in this group have released somewhere between 4 to a whopping 15 studio albums. Live albums were also not included in this list: spoiler - that means How the West was Won is not on this portion of the list even though it absolutely could be (if ya know, ya know).

Quick Stats before we get started:

Average Overall Score Amongst Album Entries: 84.5

Average Overall Score Amongst Artist Entries: 87.2

Spread on Albums: 77.6 to a 96.6

Spread on Artists: 83.9 to 91.2

Artist album entries individually ranged from 79.8 to a soaring 98.4.

If Artist entries were including all 4 of the albums used for their averages, there would only be 15 unique artists on the list, and the range of scores jumps to 85.8. And, the number one album would be different. Sorry to the number one artist, had to find a way to handicap you somehow. That artist also had all 4 of their album entries rate in the top 15 overall. Alas, I wanted to make it “objective”.

Each Category had a perfect score entrant - yep, even the critics universally acclaimed a few of one artist’s albums.