It all started while I was watching Pete and Pete (you remember that old Nickelodeon show??). It was the episode where lil Pete hears his favorite song being played by a garage band and goes into the wonderful feelings associated with having a favorite song. Well, I have never been able to experience the joy of Pete and I want to. Though it sucked for Pete since he forgot his favorite song until recapturing it at the end of the episode, mine gets to live on (bless you iPod and other lovely musical playing devices). Now the tricky part...

How in all of the songs that I own can I possibly pick out the one that I can call my favorite??

Given my sports fanatic and complete loser with nothing better to do attitudes I came up with this: a tournament.

That's right, itll be like March madness for quite some time while I figure this out. While there are considerable drawbacks: only knowing the #1 song and not really knowing where the others stand, odd matchups in tournaments, hard to define criteria, I still feel that this is worth it to me and I will at least have a better idea about what makes a favorite song.

While the criteria for picking songs is difficult, I can think of a few things for each matchup that will allow it to move on to the next round:

-Emotional Attachment to the Song (What it reminds me of, or where I was when I heard it)
-Sheer Musical Brilliance (I have my idea of talent and songs get points for having talent)
-Cultural Significance (Think about it, Star Spangled Banner itself, worthy of national anthem, but Hendrix playing it at Woodstock with Taps being played within the song=culturally significant, makes a statement if you will)
-*Critical Acclaim (Essentially an invisible force that may affect some of my choices because someone I know and respect may think the song is good so I think it is better than it is because of that)
*(Note: I have the right to completely disregard this at any time)

Tournament Breakdown:

There are approximately 3200 songs that I have to choose from, I am limiting this only to the ones I currently own. I know this leaves out the millions of songs that I have never heard and quite a few thousand I have heard and may like. But for the love of God this is just for fun and I think 3200 songs is a pretty solid sample! That will break down into 50 NCAA style tournament brackets of 64 (since 64 x 50 = 3200...I knew math would come in handy someday). I am simply going to go in order of Alphabetical order by Song Title, to hopefully avoid too many from a certain band in each bracket but still something arbitrary enough to avoid screwing with it too much.

Occasionally if I feel like it I will make up a smaller bracket or something with songs that may fit a certain genre of what I want to find out my favorite song of a certain type is. This could either be a band's best song, best war protest song, best song with the word "all" in the title, best cover song, crap like that.

Overall, this is just for fun, so the rules can be bent or broken at my discretion. However, I am taking this serious, I want to be able to crown a song "my favorite" at the end of this whole thing. I am fully aware that it could be my favorite song of the moment, or the lesser of two evils in the final or whatever, but at least I have the balls to commit to a playoff system.

I will post all of the matchups and winners for each bracket as they happen. While I will not include comments on all of them, since I am sure some of these will be obvious which is the better choice even if you aren't me, believe me I will have something to say about every matchup, so if you wish to know why I picked the way I did, ask me, then argue with me if you want, I don't care, that's what the whole point of this is.

Now let's make this happen....