This list is not my top five favorite songs.

These are five songs I’ve considered my number one.

My whole life (so far) I’ve really only had five favorite songs. Five songs I’ve considered my favorite, for one length of time or another.

The earliest such song I can remember was one from church. (Yeah, that’s going back a bit.) Until about 1987 my favorite song was the Christian standard “Sing to the Mountains.” You’ve heard it. The chorus goes… “Sing to the mountains, sing to the sea.” Except my toddler brain heard it as “Sing to the mountains, sing to the trees.” And this is how I still sing it 35 years later. Loved seeing that one on the set list at church. That was worth sticking around to the end for.

Sometime in about 1987 or so I heard a song on the radio called “Uptown Girl.” (It had actually come out in ’83.) I had no idea who Billy Joel was, let alone what an uptown girl was, but I heard it and I was hooked. This remained my favorite song until about 1992, when I heard another not-so-new song called “Up, Up, and Away.” You know this one too… 5th Dimension. It was about 25 years old at the time but stuck with me after my 5th grade chorus group had done a (probably awful) version of it. Remained in the top spot for a few years until it was replaced by the “Theme from New York, New York.” (This was probably about 1996.) Sinatra, Yankees baseball… this one had it all, and spent nearly a decade at the top of my list (head of the heap, A-number one, king of the hill, etc.).

In the summer of 2004 I adopted my current favorite song. It’s “Please, Mr. Postman,” and I’ve called it my favorite song for the past decade and a half. The debut single of The Marveletts (and the first “Motown” song to go to #1 on the Billboard pop chart, it was later recorded by The Beatles. I had that Beatles recording stuck in my head for a few months in the summer of ’04 and to be honest it’s just never gone away.

And my head has never sounded better.