Let the Music Play

The kind folks at Philips sent me a press release Thursday announcing that today, August 17, is the 25th birthday of the compact disc. Did you know the CD was that old (or that young, depending on your perspective)? And did you know that the first CD to be manufactured was The Visitors, by ABBA? Over the past 25 years, more than 200 billion CDs have been sold. That's a hell of a lot of music. So it got me thinking: How many CDs do I own, and of them, which are my favorites?

Well, I wouldn't even want to know how many I own. I think I got my first CD player and CDs when I was around 11, sometime around 1985. But to be honest, I'm sort of embarrassed that I can't remember. Today, if you saw my apartment, you'd see stacks and stacks of music. There's a CD tower, CDs stacked two layers deep on bookshelves, and CDs in a tupperware container under my bed. That's music I've bought, and mixes I've burned (like this one and this one). It has to be close to 500 CDs. Maybe more. It's insane.

As for my favorite CDs from the past 25 years, well, that's a harder question to answer. But certain albums always sound good, so off the top of my head, here are some of the CDs that seem to be in perpetual rotation, in no particular order:
* Gold, by Ryan Adams
* Back to Black, by Amy Winehouse
* Shine, by the Pat McGee Band
* Gordon, by Barenaked Ladies
* MTV Unplugged, by 10,000 Maniacs
* The Dance, by Fleetwood Mac
* Twentysomething, by Jamie Cullum
* Chariot, by Gavin DeGraw
* For the Kids (Vol. 1), by Various Artists
* For Me, It's You, by Train
* Painted from Memory, by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello

If I had to pick a list of "desert island CDs," that'd be a chunk of them. So now I ask you: What are your favorite CDs — not the best CDs, just your favorites — of the past 25 years? Not albums reissued on CD, but albums originally released on CD in the past 25 years. I really want to know. Put your answer in the comments field below.