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.

High School:
Document
The Trinity Sessions
Pleased To Meet Me

College: You know, really not much. My entire music collection was stolen my junior year, and I had to rebuild it from scratch. I went from 80 CDs and a pile to tapes to just 2 CDs -- Pearl Jam's "Ten" and TMBG's "Lincoln." And it was those 2 CDs I built my current collection. My stereo would never be silent anymore! (I haven't listened to the PJ CD in a looong time.)

Anyway, it was bit of a tabula rosa for me with music, and it was from what I bought then that my current tastes are built. So, there's nothing from back then that reminds me of college.

Except the Dead, but I didn't have any Dead CDs, tapes, or bootlegs. But in Boulder, the Dead is the soundtrack of everything. Even the goths were crypto-Deadheads.

Post-college days:
Foo Fighters
Automatic For The People

England (and Susan):
OK Computer
High Noon (Mark Heard)

Dot-com days:
March 16-20, 1992 (the soundtrack of my year of dotcom hell)
Dummy

And every other event has songs attached to them. That's a different list.

Another Perfect Pop Song: "Dixie Chicken," Little Feat.

Don't even argue. You know you sing along when you hear it.

I think "September Gurls" may be the most perfect pop I can think of. Well, that and "Good Vibrations."

I think "September Gurls" may be the most perfect pop I can think of.

I was thinking the same thing. I like the Bangles version a tad better than Big Star, though.

I prefer "Don't Worry Baby" to "Good Vibrations".

Fountains of Wayne, Welcome Interstate Managers. I had just moved to the Pioneer Valley (Western Mass.), and this was the soundtrack of late summer. I particularly associate it with the crazy period of two or three weeks when my housemate and I were staying with my mother in a tiny apartment she was housesitting for the summer, between having to move out of our apartment and being able to move into our new place. I guess that sounds kind of dull, but it's very evocative of a kind of heady, freewheeling time for me. The weather was unrelentingly hot and muggy; we spent most of our time eating takeout from the excellent barbeque place a short walk into town and watching movies; we didn't know when we'd be able to move into our own place. It was like a vacation in the middle of our real lives.

I prefer "Don't Worry Baby" to "Good Vibrations".

I prefer "God Only Knows" to both of them. But they're all good examples of what we're talking about.