1. Mira Craig "Leo" (from Tribal Dreams, Homemade)
2. Dragonette "I Get Around" (from Galore, London)
3. Megan McCauley "Tap That" (from Better Than Blood, Wind-Up)
4. Kid Rock "Lowlife (Living the Highlife)" (from Rock n Roll Jesus, Atlantic)
5. Little Big Town "Fine Line" (from A Place to Land, Equity)
6. Tim McGraw "Suspicions" (from Let It Go, Curb)
7. Mel Waiters "Smaller the Club" (from Motel Lovers, Trikont)
8. Lloyd featuring Lil Wayne "You" (from Street Love, The Inc./Universal/Motown)
9. Shop Boyz "Rollin'" (from Rockstar Mentality, Universal Republic)
10. D.B.'z featuring E-40 "Stewy" (from Hyphy Hitz, TVT)
11. Lil Mama "Lip Gloss" (Jive single)
12. Aly & AJ "Like Whoa" (from Insomniatic, Hollywood)
13. Taylor Swift "Our Song" (from Taylor Swift, Big Machine)
14. Flynnville Train "Truck Stop in the Sky" (from Flynnville Train, Show Dog)
15. Gore Gore Girls "All Grown Up" (from Get the Gore, Bloodshot)
16. Sirens "Tumble With Me" (from More Is More, MuSick)
17. Clorox Girls "Boys Girls" (from J'Aime Les Filles, BYO)
18. Trigger Renegade "Destroy Your Mind" (from Destroy Your Mind, Black Top Fade)
19. Ted Nugent "Spirit of the Buffalo" (from Spirit Warrior, Eagle)
20. Gogol Bordello "Ultimate" (from Super Taranta!, Side One Dummy)

Having just spent all of 2007 working for an important trade magazine, I somehow feel compelled to start out by mentioning that my list has nothing whatsoever to do with "alternative revenue streams in a year of plummeting physical sales." I don't think—except possibly in the sense that the Shop Boyz and Lil Mama may or may not have ringtone hits. And the Shop Boyz's ringtone hit (if it is one) wouldn't be the joyful early Beach Boys via early Bus Boys deuce coupe tribute I've included on this mix anyway, but rather "Party Like a Rock Star," which will probably wind up on my Idolator Poll Tracks (which even in the alleged iTunes age I still mainly define as "singles") ballot, even though I'm pretty sure I like "Rollin'" more. Same with Aly & AJ's mixtape track vs. their top-ten-singles track, maybe. Which is already confusing you, I bet. And which is part of the problem here.

I mean, in the real world, the Shop Boyz (and maybe Lil Mama, and the Pack, and Hurricane Chris, and Soulja Boy Tell 'Em, and Young Berg Tell 'Em, and Huey Tell 'Em, and Cupid Tell 'Em, and so on) aren't even one-hit wonders; they're more like, what, one-tenth-of-a-hit wonders, right? But I don't hear 'em that way. A couple of those people even made good albums. And albums (well, CDs) are still how I almost always listen to music. But since I mostly use a five-disc player on random shuffle, I almost never listen to albums from beginning to end.

So theoretically, the idea of "tracks" should make perfect sense to me. But one problem with tracks, when it comes to year-end lists, is that there are so damn many good ones—hundreds, these days. Maybe even thousands. And another problem is that, unlike you (who probably has titles of songs you're hearing constantly flashing on your computer screen), my CD changer is at the other end of my living room from my couch, and it doesn't light up very well. So by the time I get over to it to figure out what numbered track is playing so I can mark it on the post-it note on the CD cover (hey, this year I finally stopped writing on the CD covers themselves—I've evolved!), the player has invariably switched to the next track and it's too late. (This is especially a problem with extreme metal, which I'll get to in a minute.) And finally, the track stuff is a problem because great singles—like, ones that used to get played on radios, back when people listened to radios, back when they could afford to ride in cars—connected you with other people. Whereas, as far as I can tell, great tracks frequently only connect you with yourself. (Also, the whole concept of a single was further confused this year by the brilliant new innovation where record labels are now allowed, after artists' debut singles flop, to say, "That wasn't really the debut single, it was only a test and now we're going to release the real debut single," but let's not get into that, okay? Or ringles for that matter.)

And still, despite all said confusion . . . this list was surprisingly easy to do. I just imagined it was a mix tape! On actual, you know, tape. (Though I would have had 90 minutes then, not 80—you call this progress?) I've never actually made a mix CD in my life—true story. And the world's probably caught up with me by now, since I suspect that hardly anybody else makes mix CDs anymore, either. (Don't kids, like, trade Zunes or something these days instead?) But actually, I'm lying (again), since the first place I heard a handful of the tracks on my theoretical mix CD was on actual mix CDs that my friend Frank Kogan, who is even older than I am, mailed to me this year. Which CDs wound up shuffled up with all the other CDs in my changer.

One category of songs I expediently wound up leaving off my mix—and probably my actual ballot, too—is the category I'll call "songs that I have only ever heard on YouTube." Which medium somehow does not establish strong-enough emotional connections with songs for me. (Three excellent examples: Turisas's Finnish Viking metal Boney M cover "Rasputin"; Verka Seduchka's Ukranian transvestite Eurovision entry "Dancing"; and Cupid's Louisiana ringtone line-dance "Cupid Shuffle"—well okay, I also heard that one at a high school reunion once, but I was drunk by then.)

Another thing you might not figure out from my list is that, this year, what I mostly listened to were country albums and metal albums. A few country songs made it, but I had to omit Jack Ingram, the Bellamy Brothers, Blake Shelton, Toby Keith, Brooks & Dunn, Cole Deggs and the Lonesome, Sarah Johns, John Anderson, Shooter Jennings, Halfway to Hazard, Gretchen Wilson, the Greencards, and Brad Paisley. And in the end, I even decided to pass on including "Dry Town" by Miranda Lambert—whose album nonetheless will make my top 10 list and most everybody else's, too, and hence can probably live without my mix CD help—for "Our Song" by Taylor Swift, whose album is even better. (Not that Taylor actually needs my help, either, but you get the idea.)

What really got the short shrift, though, was metal. Especially "extreme" metal—which, by now, to most self-proclaimed extremists anyway, doesn't usually tend to include mere crazed hard rockers like Ted Nugent and "Homeless, California" (says their MySpace page) CDBaby finds Trigger Renegade, the latter of whom brandished the most destructive appetite I heard all year. But while extremely extreme 2007 folk-metal, doom-metal, prog-metal, Viking metal, space-metal, ice-metal, symphonic black metal and/or black'n'roll albums by Kosmos, Necrodemon, Witchcraft, Mustach, Hardingrock, Svartsot, Hearse, Manes, Kekal, Korpiklaani, Moonsorrow, DHG, Lengsel, Necronoclast, Cruachan, Minsk, the Hidden Hand, October File, Alchemist, Litmus, the Vision Bleak, Sear Bliss, Vreid, Rwake, Horna, and Xasthur (for starters) all sounded really cool (and hence add up to the genre in which I probably heard the most albums I enjoyed in 2007), the sheer quantity of at least marginally decent stuff ultimately all muddles together in the long-tail run. And when it comes to songs per se, the genre generally seems to offer a disconcerting lack of truly discrete ones to latch onto.

So what did make my list, then? A young co-dependent four-part-harmony country-rock group channeling Fleetwood Mac, a young self-contained guitar-boogie country-rock band channeling Rockpile, umpteenth-generation punk miniaturists getting their genders confused, teen-pop ingénues getting frisky and riding roller coasters and applying lip gloss while standing by high school lockers and pretending to rap and reeling off zodiac signs and roaring like lions, a vulnerable falsetto R&B crooner and ubiquitous genius rapper ripping off Spandau Ballet, hyphy kiddies ripping off Family Guy while going kookoo-silly-bananas, an over-the-top slut anthem from an apparent Canadian neo-new wave band I've never heard another note by, a highly topical tribute to bison by a Michigander who knows his way around a shooting range, Hollywood Brats and Crystals covers by Michigan glam and garage gals, an Eddie Rabbit cover by Faith Hill's husband making a smooth-jazzed yacht-rock move, Pamela Anderson's Michigan ex-husband making black music for the white man with more uproarious punch lines than he's managed in eons (including shout-outs to an eight-track by the aforementioned buffalo-loving Michigan gun nut), a Southern soul journeyman arguing on a German record label that intimately jukeboxed venues are preferable to oversized DJ-spun clubs. And an inspiring truckload full of assertive and unbashful women taking charge of their sex lives.

And finally, what made my list was back-from-the-U.S.S.R. handlebar-mustachio Balkan-beat fiddler-on-the-rye sexytime tanz party muzik from Ukranian-American oompah-punk schticksters who played with Madonna at Live Earth and are finally learning how to write genuinely memorable songskis—including the one that wisely winds up my 2007 by reminding us, "There was never any good old days/They are today, they are tomorrow!" (Not to mention, "Nam segodnja suzdena—A bti mezget chto kogda da-j povezet!") I don't know if I buy it. But after a year from heck, I know I want to.

Chuck Eddy is senior editor for Billboard and the author of Stairway to Hell and The Accidental Evolution of Rock 'n' Roll. He lives in Queens, NY.