Whatever I think I know about the limits of the power of art, I owe to Tori Amos. My worldview has categories that weren't there before her. Her albums have changed what I expect from music, how I understand other people, how I understand how other people understand themselves, how I interpret my own environment and impulses, how I reason, how I breathe. My weeks of immersion in from the choirgirl hotel were as far outside of myself as I've ever been. Tori may be the only human being who has ever made me wonder, by speaking to me in an alien language, whether the one I use to converse with myself isn't actually gibberish. If the goal of aging is to unravel your naïve certainties, I'm not sure I would be ten years older today without her.

The Nineties were the first decade I didn't resent sharing with the rest of the world. Tori was partly responsible for that, too, but the center of it, and the center of my understanding of these ten years of music, is Jagged Little Pill. Everything stretches out, in one direction or the other, from a twenty-one-year-old Alanis singing into Glen Ballard's microphones like she knew, somehow, that she could free an entire paralyzed universe with three honest words. Alanis got us from Nirvana to Britney Spears, and if you feel the urge to claim that this isn't progress, remember that you and I and Britney are still alive.

In the Eighties, I operated on the assumption that music history began in 1978, and human history not much before that. I inhabited small rooms. Runrig handed me a heritage whose resonance I can't explain any other way than by attributing life-force to blood, and taught me, by demonstrating an emotion I didn't previously know how to experience, why I had to live in a bigger world. Memento mori is trivial and pedantic; Amazing Things to me is art's single most magnificent memento vita, its most awestruck hymn to human potential and the inherent grace of life.

While much of the decade suggested ways in which I should be different, Scott Miller kept writing songs about the parts of me worth keeping. The Tape of Only Linda and Interbabe Concern were both my albums of their years, but when I go back and listen to Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things I realize that it has displaced Lolita Nation from my Desert Island Disk list, and become my glossary of what's remarkable about every Game Theory or Loud Family record before and since, and what's missing from every other conception of musically and emotionally ambitious pop. Scott is one of the people who inspire me to keep writing songs of my own, but more importantly, he's why I don't mind if they're never any good. He has already made the best album I would ever aspire to.

Sparkling, buoyant, gleefully superficial pop is only a fractionally lower form of art than Scott's abstruse version, and there are no grander masters of it than Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson, and no giddier, less existential summary than Roxette's greatest-hits collection. I am never more purely happy than when I am listening to this record, and while happiness isn't the highest emotion, the higher ones can't exist without it.

This was also the decade I rediscovered folk music, and finally found a personal sense of American tradition to go with the Celtic one borrowed from Runrig. America is a frail, chaotic, epic idea, and it feels only appropriate, to me, to suspend it between these antipodean evocations, one Emmylou and Daniel Lanois' masterpiece of atmospheric production and ethereal reserve, the other Steve Barry's perfectly unadorned recording of Patty's fearless catharses. These records both have copyright dates, but I suspect they've existed forever.

I have a weakness for heroic, encyclopedic art, and would be sad if any decade, or century, went by without somebody attempting the insane task of recapitulating the entire thing in one box, however lopsided and unwieldy. It's against my instincts to include a three-month-old album in a best-of-the-decade list, but I believe the things I believe, and among them is the unexpectedly stubborn conviction that Stephin Merritt's sprawling, disembodied musical may be the seminal farewell to everything that, according to the lines on the calendar, is now a vanished age.

Marillion officially became one of my favorite bands the day I bought my first CD player, took it home, set it down in my bedroom unopened, and went back out to buy Seasons End, my first CD. By the time Holidays in Eden came out, a year later, I'd learned to adore everything labyrinthine and inaccessible about the first five Marillion albums, and this largely straightforward set of small, self-contained pop songs seemed misconceived and tangential. But somehow, slowly, over the past ten years, as the band has album by album written a new history, this tangent has precessed into line, and now when I look back, I can hardly see past it. Five of the first six songs here have come to dominate my internal conception of majestic pop aplomb the way the first three songs on The Joshua Tree once did. I'd trade "The Party" for "Kayleigh", if I could, but it's Steve Hogarth's version of the band that has carried me through this decade, I just now fully understand, the "new" incarnation of Marillion that has spent ten years explaining how close this album was to perfect all along, and thus surreptitiously supplanted the older band, with the same name, that I thought I meant when I said I loved them so dearly.

Perhaps the most unambiguous testament to how thoroughly my tastes have metamorphosed from rock to pop, over the last decade, is that the two records I think of as the Nineties' crowning rock achievements are melancholy pop so thinly disguised. Gold Against the Soul is almost certainly the least revolutionary Manic Street Preachers album, but it's what I pull out when I want to listen to one, instead of just admiring its vehemence. Shireen Liane's similarly brash and triumphant elegy to dazed compassion is my vote for the decade's most undeservedly neglected album, a revelatory tracing of the secret vein of empathic fragility that runs through every poster idol from the Beatles to the Sex Pistols to the Spice Girls.

I tend to have agendas for liking things, to insist on imposing contexts on records in which they epitomize some noble ideal for which I happen to need a champion. I can think of one for Hat Full of Stars, too, if I squint, something about the thin line between willful kitsch and true art, but the truth is that I just like it. Maybe the combination of Cyndi's squeaky voice, Eric Bazilian and Rob Hyman's glossy accompaniments, Junior Vasquez's crinkly production and a ghost entourage from a dozen odd corners of history and geography doesn't mean anything, but I don't care. I think they needed each other, and none of us guessed how badly. This is, to me, one of the inexplicable hidden fissures in the surface of what's possible, elusive to the point of myth, where little bits of discarded magic collect until there's enough of it to eat through the lining into a new world underneath.

Two of my three favorite live acts, and two of the bands that have figured most prominently in my evolving understanding of the boundaries of popular music, didn't earn their places in my life with single albums, and are thus overlooked by the top-ten list. In Low's case, their catalog unfolds as slowly as their songs, and my shortest explanation of how they can be both one of the world's most powerful bands and one of the most intangible still requires three albums, absorbed over the course of several years, and seeing them play at least once. In Mecca Normal's case, sometimes no more than a couple songs on any given album hint at the destruction one singer and one guitarist can wreak on stage, but the imaginary compilation of only these moments would probably be my vote for the best punk album in twenty years, never mind ten.

By the end of 1990 I was 23, and had a degree with honors from Harvard, so I can really think of no excuse for believing that there were only two bands in the entire world who'd made better records, in the preceding twelve months, than Iron Maiden and Megadeth. The Living Colour and Pixies votes, for two albums I haven't played in at least eight years, must have been left-over enthusiasm from Vivid and Surfer Rosa. Then again, to be fair, the only album I've added since that I already knew about in 1990 was Hex's, and I doubt Donnette Thayer and Steve Kilbey's druidic meditation converted any other Iron Maiden fans, either.

I knew, at the time, that there was something perverse about giving T'Pau the #1 spot, but the night I sat down to make the list I got all these records out, and The Promise was the one I least willingly ejected to put in the others. The Big Country album meant a great deal to me at the time, but now that I know they survived it, it's less important. Spirit of Eden has eclipsed Laughing Stock. More metal albums have slipped off. I really tried to be honest with myself about the Bags, whose guitarist's sister I was living with at the time, but apparently I failed. Fittingly, the one album from her collection that I had to go buy after we broke up, years later, was Billy Bragg's Don't Try This at Home. Sarah and Runrig were later discoveries, EMF a reluctant conversion. I think Never Loved Elvis was eleventh when I made the original list, and according to my database The Ruby Sea was the first Thin White Rope album I'd ever heard, and I bought it on December 27th, so I think I can be forgiven for requiring more than four days to absorb their alarming clamor.

I have abandoned two more metal albums, but added one new one. I didn't discover Shindell and McKennitt until later, and I doubt I would have considered Roxette's live/outtake/demo miscellany eligible at the time, even if I hadn't loathed them. Del Amitri is only hiding at eleventh or so, but I don't think I've ever seen a band obliterate their own credibility as thoroughly as Soul Asylum.

I bought Exile in Guyville the day after I made this list, and instantly knew I'd missed one. As with the previous Big Country album, these Big Country and Kate Bush records were hugely important to me when they were new, but now that I only think about them in the context of all their earlier records, these seem minor. The Magnetic Fields and Thought Industry albums were later discoveries, and Fumbling Towards Ecstasy was a casualty of a trick I tried to play with Canadian and American release dates, but Black 47 have endeared themselves to me over the years. Aimee Mann drifts in and out of my graces according to some electromagnetic flux I can't isolate. The most astonishing thing is that I got Amazing Things in May, 1993, and didn't realize that I wanted it on my DID list (never mind in this top ten) until more than a year later.

Bee Thousand was another belated epiphany, and if it weren't for 69 Love Songs, it probably would have been on the decade list. This year Geek the Girl was the one I bought within a week of making the list. The other additions are all later discoveries. American Music Club are my favorite band who no longer appear on any of these lists. The Laurie Anderson album blew me away at the time, but I had a suspicion I wouldn't often feel like going back to it, and I was right.

Scott Walker's Tilt is the casualty of the decade. I actually put it on my first draft of the Nineties list, but when I got it out and played it again, to figure out how high it should go, it didn't seem half as scary as I remembered. Most of these additions came later, but how I left off Suddenly, Tammy!, I can't imagine. Everclear would likely be twelfth on an expanded decade list. My confident declaration that Pieces of You was the most important folk album since Joni Mitchell's Blue no longer seems quite as prescient, but I said at the time that we should check back in twenty years, so I might still turn out to be right.

Predictably, the closer we get to the present, the less I feel compelled to change. I didn't know about the Slingbacks and Heavenly at the time, but leaving off Marry Me Jane, which I did consciously, is the biggest regret I have about any list I've ever made.

I think I got both Buckner and the Caulfields the first week of January. The rest of these adjustments are crashingly inconsequential.

Two in, two out.

This year I had the good sense not to buy any new records in the first week of January. There's a pile of unopened CDs next to my keyboard, though, and at least two are from 1999, so it's only a matter of time. I can barely keep from ripping them open, plunging ahead to find out what the first way will be in which I stop being whomever I was.