"Waltz the Halls Always" by Game Theory.

I Want it that Way - BSB

Oh GAWD yes. A pox upon Diane Warren for writing that song.

I, I SEE LIFE

my iPod has learned to play my Guadalcanal Diary often. This album was on a cassette with 10,000 Maniacs - In my Tribe the summer I was 17 and they were played on almost continuous loop for 3 months.

What album or albums stick out for a specific time period for you?

"My Sharona" I don't even really like it, but I can't get it out of my head when I've heard it.(for the pop song question) Time period question: I actually broke up with my bf the week "Unbreak My Heart" by Toni Braxton came out so that will always mean my saddest week in Feb. 1995.

Perfect Pop is pure relativism. Your own description is the only one you need.

I kind of agree with this, but I do think that "pop" should have some connection to its etymology. That is, it should be popular, at least potentially. Take Chic's album Real People (which contained one of my Buffistamix choices, "26".) It was the follow up to Risqué and "Good Times". It was as good an album and had a handful of potential hits but it pretty much died in the water. The sound had changed a bit, built more around Nile's guitar and less around 'Nard's bass, but it was still pop if not an actual hit. Whereas Gregorian chants aren't pop even if that album a few years back went multiplatinum. And some artists work both sides of the divide: "Sweet Jane" was a pop song even if it didn't sell any better than the rest of the Velvet's catalog, but "Sister Ray" was definitively not pop.

Along those lines I also think that a Perfect Pop song has to hold up in the event it does become a big hit and you hear it all the freakin' time. Could be a great hook ("Satisfaction"), a memorable refrain ("I'm a loser, baby, so why don't ya kill me"), a killer arrangement (Aretha's "I Say a Little Prayer"), whatever... it just needs to make you say, I gotta hear that again... and again.

Love formally pop but deeply twisted stuff like Nick Lowe's "Marie Provost," the touching (honestly) story of a faded silent film star's sad end ("She was a winner/That became the doggie's dinner/She never meant that much to me").

"Plasticine" - Placebo
"How Soon is Now" - The Smiths

... and oddly "I'm Not Okay" by My Chemical Romance, because I canNOT get it out of my head. I've tried. I may have to break down and buy it off of iTunes.

What album or albums stick out for a specific time period for you?

Darkness On the Edge of Town - senior year of high school.

Layla - first heartbreak, also senior year of high school.

Gap Band's Greatest Hits - dancing at college.

Murmur - first summer out of college.

Zen Arcade - living in Boston.

Crowded House Greatest Hits - painting Emmett's room just before he was born.

Jonathan Richman's Rockin' & Romance - when my relationship with my first SF girlfriend ended.

There are also specific mix tapes I listened to incessantly when my marriage ended. Lots of Townes Van Zandt and Richard Thompson and Lucinda Williams and Alison Krause and Mary Black and Iris Dement.

A song and a moment? "All Over the World" by ELO, going off to college.

Perfect pop song? I know I'm gonna get grief for this, but "Moonlight Feels Right" by Starbuck.

I listened to the Pixies' Doolittle obsessively during my junior year of high school.

Does Sultans of Swing count as pop? I bliss out whenever I hear that guitar.

Time and Place -- Diary of Horace Wimp, Supertramp. It went to something like #3 in the UK when I was visiting there in 79. Other songs from that visit that are stamped on my brain are I Don't Like Mondays, Boomtown Rats, Money, the Flying Lizards and Bang Bang, B.A. Robertson.