Whales sing. The theory is songs are their way to find love—the ocean is numbing in its lonely sprawl. Even when swimming miles apart, they'll change their tune to match the others. They follow some intrinsic pattern. Nobody knows why.

The first time I heard SOPHIE's "Hard," I felt like my car was going to fall apart. I was driving home from my night shift at the front desk of a tower dorm, using new music to stay awake as dawn blushed over Iowa City's east-side cobbled roads.

She and I stood face-to-face—cheeks rolling as we chewed in calculated fury—in a bathroom flooded so many times you could see from peeling paint the location of each waterline. Moments ago, we’d scoured the concrete for bright strips of green between the rippling sheet of the Mississippi River and the faded auditorium where we now conspired.

At 11:59 p.m. on the first day of 1971, families watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson witnessed the last ad for cigarettes ever broadcast on television. 60 seconds dedicated to Virginia Slims. Those who preferred CBS’s Merv Griffin saw the same but for a different pack—Marlboros. Dick Cavett fans got Benson & Hedges.

1961 was what MAD Magazine called an Upside-Up year. It’s strobogrammatic, rotationally symmetric—flip it upside-down while no one’s looking and the number appears to have remained the same. If 1969 is the year that changed everything, we ought to christen 1961 as the year the world flipped upside-down, unnoticed; no one seemed to be paying any attention.

There's no such thing as a year—this fact is self-evident. Right? No one can force you to cut off the limbs of life and tie them up in boxes with eager strings. We carry only the clocks in our ticking cells. Who made Gregory the master of time? By all rational accounts, my New Year started on the first of November.

Welcome to the Sixth Annual Year in Review Collaborative Playlist & Music Celebration. This project started in 2015 as a simple message asking my friends to add their Top 10 Favorite Songs of 2015 to a playlist so we all had something to listen to as we drove home on our holiday breaks.

We're here—I'll get right to it, but I want to say thank you for reading. Also, I've put them all into a playlist arranged from top to bottom, for whenever you have six hours to kill. Now, for the final leg of the tour:

As we enter the Top 50, you know the routine—this is not a race but a retrospective, and while I do admit that the closer we get to #1, the closer these songs get to my heart, I will not be handing out any trophies.

As I said before, lists can be as prescriptive as they are restrictive if they are read as a hierarchy. Mine should not be; they're subject to the whims of my everyday thoughts and feelings (two of my most favorite things—until we reach the limit of my being and encounter yours). I intend to serve and share, not impose. This is less a competition than a hundred-course meal for the ears, each song a specialty dish on a gourmet menu.

Know that lists like these are flawed by their very nature, limiting art the same way pinning an identity to your infinite spirit will limit what you feel you're able to become. With that in mind, these numbers are not a hierarchy—they are more like tree tags marking a path through a dazzling forest. Think of this more as a guided tour of nature than a tournament or competition.

I sit in a daze for a very long time. There are no more signs of animals. I'm sitting on the rope bridge with a softball-sized bug. A dead bug, now. It's dead, and I've killed it—the only life I've taken in years.

Kate stands before me, her body stone still while her eyes fizzle and pop like pink sparklers. Each one fills its whole socket, wide as a clementine. They strike me as separate entirely from Kate, so different in their restless flits and flickers.

I step into her shadow, her apron stained with rhubarb. I look up at her tight blond curls, some fading into spots of gray. Her smell is sweet and heavy, like the curtains that hang in my grandmother's home. Cate makes her way into the hall to stand beside her sister, then turns to face the tapping on the window.

I have no idea how long I’ve been walking, but a pain in my leg says I’d misjudged the distance. I see nothing for a long time but this moonlit corridor. The stars above me are out in full force, though no constellations I recognize.

I'm driving north. I'm driving north, again, but everything feels fine. South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky. Moods like this come sometimes, trending toward bleaker moments, the narcotic flood of freedom pressing against misery just as cold flattens its nose against my Ranger's windows.

It's the nauseating quality of love—barely worth enduring at all, but who can help it? There's no getting off this ride. We swing to the same spot every year. If we gave form to time and stretched it, the Earth would look like a giant slinky. Spear a certain point and you dissect me every year.

Try sustaining equilibrium and you'll find that it's impossible. Will we ever reach a self that takes only what we can give? Ever give enough to match what we extract? It's a wicked concept forged in the fires of ideals, like justice or closure or the perfect way to load a dishwasher.

The tide—the slow breathing of the Earth. Breathe in and the sea contracts. Breathe out and the waves will swell. Our lungs move on behalf of our brains, but the ocean takes orders from the glowing moon. The celestial champion of love.

There is nothing we feel more often than air—an assertion so obvious as to sound idiotic. Yet nothing's more easily forgotten than that which is with us every day. We are wrapped in atmosphere at every moment.