30 Songs That Built Me: Ranked, Remembered, Revered

To celebrate turning 30, I made a list of my Top 30 songs of all time—here’s what made the cut.

I turn 30 a week from today, and this felt like a cool way to honor the imprint music has had on my life. These songs aren’t just favorites—they’re scaffolding. Markers of movement, memory, and meaning. If I could give my taste a geography, it would stretch somewhere between Douala and Brooklyn, with layovers in Paris, Dublin, and a roadside suya stand just off the N4. It would smell like incense and fried plantains. It would feel like a basement party and a baptism. It would taste like a mango just past ripe—overripe with feeling, alive with contradiction. This list holds it all.

Genre-wise, it’s a wild braid: gospel tangled with amapiano, Motown colliding with alt-folk, coupé-décalé shoulder-shuffling beside soft jazz and indie rage. Some of these songs are structurally perfect. Others are emotionally catastrophic. But all of them—every single one—left fingerprints on me.

This is a definitive ranking of the thirty songs that have most shaped my life. Bold. I know. I’m not claiming they’re the greatest songs ever made. I’m saying they’re the ones that built me. They are memory triggers, mood stabilizers, grief companions, and joy midwives. I chose them based on impact—what they carried me through, what they carried me toward, and what they carried within me.

Below, you’ll find the full list—ranked from 1 to 30 —and a short list of honorable mentions. I’ve written personal blurbs for each of the Top 30 tracks. And for those who want to listen along, I’ve also created something bigger: an 800-song, 54-hour sonic memoir—a sprawling playlist that maps the deeper emotional and cultural terrain of my last three decades. You can find it on both Spotify and Apple Music (linked below).

Because sometimes, when language fails, you build your life from sound instead.

1. “C’est La Vie” – Henri Dikongué

Some songs become so deeply stitched into your life that they stop feeling like music and start feeling like inheritance. “C’est La Vie” was the first song I ever loved. It played at our house parties on Rushmore Avenue, when the adults let the volume rise just a little too high for the hour. It was the hum beneath church camps and science fairs, and the sound in the kitchen while my little brother got ready for fifth grade. It’s the song I’d ask my mother to put on even before I knew what the lyrics meant. And yet, I did know.

Dikongué sings about the birth of his first child, about wonder and responsibility, about seeing a new life and suddenly understanding your own. It’s tender, cyclical, and a little haunted. The guitar plays in a spiral, like it’s searching for something you forgot to name. Dikongué once said the song was about love, nostalgia, and the ache of those who leave a country behind. It’s all that—and more.

A lullaby and a prophecy. A song about becoming. A permission slip to grieve what was lost, and a reminder that nothing is ever truly gone if you remember the sound it made.

2. “Holocene” – Bon Iver

This isn’t a sad song. It’s something lonelier than that—more reverent. “Holocene” doesn’t console you so much as it names you, then lets you float inside that naming. The first time I heard it, I was 17 and certain the world would unfold for me like a map. Instead, it undid me. The refrain—“and I was not magnificent”—didn’t sting. It freed me. I return to this song when I want to remember that smallness can be holy, that beauty doesn’t need permission to devastate. It’s not therapy. It’s ritual.

3. “Ye” – Burna Boy

There are weeks of my life this song alone carried me through. Not in some metaphorical, vibey way—I mean it physically woke me up when I couldn’t. “Ye” was more than my anthem; it was my voltage. I’ve played it in too many cities to count. I’ve watched rooms shift the moment that first gbam gbam hits. Burna doesn’t beg you to move—he dares you to stay still. And I never can. Every time I hear it, I remember I’m allowed to be larger than whatever tried to shrink me that day. This is not a banger. It’s a resurrection.

4. “Sunrise” – Norah Jones

In the poem Twelve Questions, Bhanu Kapil writes: “How will you begin? How will you live now?” This song has always felt like an answer. Or at least, the first step toward one. “Sunrise” taught me that a song doesn’t need to crescendo to feel complete. That something can arrive gently and still hold you completely. I used to play it in dark rooms, not because I was sad, but because I needed something tender to guide me through the quiet. Norah Jones doesn’t demand your attention. She coaxes it—like light filtering in through thin curtains, slowly naming what the day might become. It’s a song about rhythm, about the kind of intimacy that exists before language.

5. “Khusela” – Kabza De Small feat. Msaki

This isn’t just one of my favorite songs—it’s one of the greatest songs of all time. Period. And Kabza De Small is a generational talent. The kind you don’t just hear—you live alongside. If amapiano had a Rosetta Stone, it would be Kabza. And “Khusela” might be his masterpiece. It’s not just the production—though it’s flawless. It’s how the rhythm carries both groove and grief. Msaki’s voice doesn’t just soar—it intercedes. It arrives with smoke and salt and grace. This song is a petition disguised as a dance track. A prayer for protection tucked inside the most luxurious arrangement. If divinity ever wanted to speak softly over a log drum, it would sound like this.

I was in Stellenbosch, on a wine farm, humming it to a stranger—couldn’t name it, but couldn’t stop. Later someone told me what it was: “Khusela.” Protect us. I knew instantly they were right. The night before I left Cape Town, I stayed up until nearly four a.m. with old friends—some I hadn’t seen in years. We sang. We cracked open. When this song came on, something shifted. That whole trip felt like baptism.

On the flight home, I played it for three straight hours. Not because I was sad. But because it anchored me. Held me in a way no one else could. I landed in New York. A week later, I chose sobriety. Khusela didn’t tell me what to do. It simply made space for the most honest part of me to speak—and I listened.

6. “Pyramids” – Frank Ocean

There’s a version of me that lives inside this song and nowhere else. A version that believes in metaphor as oxygen, in maximalism as gospel. “Pyramids” is myth, mirage, love letter, collapse. It moves through time and tempo without apology. One minute it’s drenched in neon funk; the next, it’s bare and pleading. Frank doesn’t ask you to understand the woman he’s singing about. He asks you to kneel at the altar of what she represents: Blackness, labor, desire, empire, memory. I’ve cried to this song. I’ve danced to it. I’ve studied it like scripture. There’s nothing else like it.

7. “Superstition” – Stevie Wonder

Some songs are just built right. “Superstition” is so well-engineered, it practically drives itself. But beneath the slap of that clavinet, Stevie was warning us: be careful who you believe, especially when they dress fear as wisdom. My parents introduced me to this song early, probably thinking they were passing on taste. What they passed on was suspicion. The good kind. The kind that makes you question institutions, not ancestors. As a kid, I danced to it in the kitchen. As an adult, I realized Stevie had laced a whole warning beneath the funk. Don't get caught mistaking noise for prophecy.

8. “Trop C’est Trop” – Extra Musica

If Koffi Olomide’s Loi opens the floor, Extra Musica’s Trop C’est Trop holds it hostage. This was the song that made sure nobody left the party early. Extra Musica, led by the ever-iconic Roga Roga, redefined what a Congolese rumba ensemble could sound like—relentless, rich, and unrepentantly loud. “Trop C’est Trop” is what happens when joy meets exhaustion and demands more anyway. The guitars loop like a fever dream. The drums never blink. It’s not just ndombolo—it’s a commandment. In my house, it wasn’t a party until this came on. The floor became a battlefield. The body, protest. The sweat? Pure testimony.

9. “Akanamali” – Samthing Soweto & Sun-El Musician

In 2018, you couldn’t go anywhere in South Africa without hearing this song. It was in taxis, at street markets, thumping from every other stall. But when I heard it—really heard it—it wasn’t in public. I was alone, mid-hike in the Cape mountains, and the track shuffled into my headphones like a secret. "Akanamali" means “he has no money”—but nothing about the song sounds impoverished. It’s lush, gleaming, almost divine. A love song that resists transaction. A melody that floats on its own worth. The lesson: don’t confuse wealth with abundance. Some things don’t need fixing. They just need to be felt.

10. “Baltimore” – Nina Simone (w/ special nod to Lianne La Havas’s cover)

Nina doesn’t just sing “Baltimore.” She surveys it. Names it. Refuses to look away. Her voice on this track doesn’t soothe—it scrapes. The arrangement is deceptively soft, but every lyric lands like a steel boot in wet soil. “Hard times in the city,” she says, as if we didn’t already know. But somehow, we didn’t. Not like this.

This isn’t a song you play for ambiance. It’s one you play when the air feels thick with memory and you need something clearer than hope. “Baltimore” is a blues, yes—but it’s also a report. A dispatch. A bruised, brilliant testimony from someone who had the language and wasn’t afraid to use it. It gave me language, too. Not just for Baltimore, but for every place I’ve ever loved that never quite loved us back.

And Lianne La Havas’ later cover—gentler, less ragged—is also worth sitting with. But Nina? Nina walks you through the wreckage herself. Hand in hand. Voice like gravel. Eyes wide open.

11. “Find Your Way Back” – Beyoncé

As a card-carrying member of the Hive, I had dozens of contenders for this list. But this song arrived in a moment that made it feel less like a track and more like intervention. I was coming of age in Paris, working a job that drained me, untethered in a city that had stopped being romantic and started feeling like an indictment. Then this dropped.

“Find Your Way Back” didn’t scream or soar—it nudged. A whispered directive tucked into Afrohouse syncopation and cosmic synths. Beyoncé wasn’t selling strength here. She was reminding me of softness, of ancestry, of orientation. Find your way back to yourself. Not the version I’d auditioned for the world, but the one I’d quietly abandoned while trying to survive it. It didn’t save me. It did something more useful—it gave me a mirror.

12. “Jesus Walks” – Kanye West

Before the spectacle, before the pivot into chaos, there was this: a war cry dressed as a gospel. “Jesus Walks” hit the airwaves like prophecy—with a drumline borrowed from Sunday processions and a desperation that still stings. I was in middle school, wearing too-big jeans and trying to figure out if God still listened to boys who broke rules. Kanye said yes. But not neatly.

What I remember is feeling seen—not by God, necessarily, but by someone who was also trying to make sense of power, rage, and salvation. “I want to talk to God,” he says, “but I’m afraid 'cause we ain’t spoke in so long.” That line has followed me for decades. Some songs become doctrine. This one became dilemma.

13. “Hommage à Jonathan” – DJ Arafat

DJ Arafat wrote this track in memory of his friend—Jonathan—who died in a motorcycle crash. Twenty years later, Arafat would meet the same fate. Which makes “Jonathan” feel less like a dedication and more like a foreshadowing. A song that accidentally wrote its creator’s exit into its own DNA.

Musically, it’s everything coupé-décalé was meant to be: high-octane, defiant, addictive. Arafat wasn’t mourning in the Western sense. He turned grief into momentum. The beat doesn’t pause for silence; it insists on joy. But underneath the tempo, you can hear it: the ache of a man dancing to keep from breaking.

Now, when we play it, we’re not just remembering Jonathan. We’re exhuming Arafat. This isn’t a song we listen to. It’s a song we summon.

14. “Soul Makossa” – Manu Dibango

This is the root. The DNA. The sample before the sample. Long before I knew anything about Makossa as a genre, I knew this groove. It’s the kind of track that doesn't just travel—it smuggles identity across oceans. Dibango recorded this in Paris, but it carries the weight of Douala, the swagger of Harlem, the pulse of Lagos.

“Soul Makossa” is a saxophone sermon, a commandment in broken English and bone-deep rhythm. Michael Jackson sampled it. Rihanna flipped it. But the original still walks with more elegance and edge than either. For me, this track feels like cultural inheritance: borderless, undeniable, alive.

15. “Parce qu’on vient de loin” – Corneille

This was my favorite song in third grade. I didn’t yet know that Corneille had survived the Rwandan genocide. That at seventeen, he witnessed the assassination of his entire family. I just knew the song made me feel something I couldn’t name. A kind of ache wrapped in melody. A voice that sounded like it was both crying and surviving at once.

“Parce qu’on vient de loin” translates to “because we come from far”—but “far” here doesn’t just mean distance. It means grief. It means rupture. It means the long road back to self. Corneille sings in the conditional tense, as if everything is still hanging in the balance. For me, it’s never been a sad song. It’s a sacred one. Proof that you can carry unimaginable loss and still find the breath to sing.

16. “Nothing Compares 2 U” – Sinéad O’Connor

This song came out years before I was born, but it still found me. Sophomore year of high school, in the backseat of a friend’s dad’s car after band camp. He put it on, casually. I sat there stunned, trying not to cry. That summer, I watched the music video over 100 times—obsessed with the way she held the camera, held the ache.

Sinéad’s voice doesn’t plead. It pronounces. “Nothing Compares 2 U” is less about heartbreak than it is about unfillable space. The kind of loss that turns time into noise. I didn’t understand that kind of grief then, not really. But her voice made me feel like I did. Years later, when I watched the 2022 documentary Nothing Compares, her story hit me all over again—her defiance, her isolation, her refusal to sing anything she didn’t believe.

What I carry most isn’t the lyrics. It’s the silence after the last note. The way it leaves you—still.

17. “Unaware (Live From His Mother’s Living Room)” – Allen Stone

I stumbled on this during a late-night YouTube spiral—the kind you fall into when you’re not ready to sleep but too tired to talk. And there he was: barefoot, red-haired, and belting like he had nothing left to lose. “Unaware” hit like an open wound. Not polished. Not postured. Just voice and vulnerability.

What makes the live version so staggering is the tension: the silence before the chorus drops, the audience not quite ready for what’s coming. Soul music is a heavy inheritance, and Allen doesn’t pretend to carry it the same way. But in this moment, he brings reverence. Urgency. A rawness that doesn’t feel borrowed. There’s no mimicry here—just presence. And sometimes, that’s enough to make you stop what you’re doing and listen all the way through.

18. “Back to Black” – Amy Winehouse

My god, I love Amy Winehouse. And my god, I love this song. “Back to Black” is where she gutted the past—hers and ours—and made it sound elegant. She blended retro soul with 60s girl-group melancholy, but what cut through was the honesty. Amy sang like her voice had already seen the afterlife and still had something left to report.

There’s a line—“we only said goodbye with words”—that lands different every time. Some days it sounds like closure. Other days it sounds like refusal. I’ve played this in grief, in love, in post-breakup fog. And it never misses. Amy didn’t ask to be iconic. She just sang what hurt. And that was enough.

19. “Masiziyekelele (14.11.16)” – Bongeziwe Mabandla

Picture this: I’m in Dublin during the pandemic, locked down in a grad school apartment, gray outside, gray inside. I’m watching a South African indie film on Netflix, and this voice cuts through—a voice I didn’t recognize, but instantly needed to. That was Bongeziwe. And this song woke something in me.

“Masiziyekelele” means let us surrender ourselves. And in that moment, it felt like exactly what I needed: to unclench. To soften. The guitar moves like breath. The atmosphere is soaked in longing. Listening felt like plunging into the Irish Sea in November—insane, but cleansing. Bongeziwe became one of my favorite artists after this. I never looked back.

20. “m.A.A.d city” – Kendrick Lamar

There were so many Kendrick tracks I could’ve picked—but this was the one. It was “m.A.A.d city” that turned me from a listener into a disciple. The structure, the aggression, the switch-up mid-track like a heartbeat skipping—it made me want to write. And I did. I wrote an entire college paper about it.

Seeing Kendrick live years later, I realized just how deep it runs. I knew every word. Every inflection. Every bar. This isn’t just a song about Compton—it’s a crash course in what happens when memory refuses to quiet down. It’s narrative as combat. Rap as report card. Genius disguised as adrenaline.

21. “Conquistadors” – Binary Star

You’re probably wondering how this ended up here. I get it. Binary Star is an obscure underground duo from Pontiac, Michigan. But this track—this one stuck. At first it was osmosis: my older brother’s favorite group, blasting through our house like gospel. But somewhere in middle school, I started listening on my own.

“Conquistadors” has everything a great rap song should—pacing, punchlines, and politics that sneak up on you. It’s conscious rap without the condescension. The line “I’m conquering subconsciousness” still rings like a thesis. They made this record on a shoestring budget, and it sounds tighter than most major label debuts. This song made me take hip-hop seriously. And more than that—it made me curious.

22. “She” – Laura Mvula

This song moves like someone testing the floorboards before they walk. “She” isn’t flashy. It’s careful. Suspended in air. A hush of strings, a few repeated chords, and Laura Mvula’s voice—cautious at first, then blooming into something orchestral and uncontainable.

Laura has always felt like a deep-cut favorite. Not because she’s obscure, but because loving her feels intimate. She sings with a kind of ache that doesn’t beg for attention. It trusts it’ll find the ones who need her. “She” is the one I return to when I want to feel the slow burn of becoming. It doesn’t rush. It knows the crescendo is coming.

23. “Something” – Snarky Puppy & Lalah Hathaway

My college voice coach, Dr. Trineice, played this for me one day in rehearsal. “Watch this,” she said. And then it happened—Lalah Hathaway, mid-verse, split her voice in two. Polyphonic overtones, sung clean. Not a trick. A phenomenon. Even the band gasped.

But the whole performance deserves reverence. “Something” is not just virtuosic. It’s elastic. The groove breathes. The arrangement trusts space. Lalah doesn’t just sing—she disappears into the chord changes like she’s been living there for years. It was the first time I saw live music do something that felt supernatural. After that, I understood voice differently. Like maybe it wasn’t just an instrument. Maybe it was a spell.

24. “Trouble” – Meshell Ndegeocello

Meshell’s No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin was one of my favorite albums of the past few years. It didn’t just interpret Baldwin—it communed with him. “Trouble” is its incantatory centerpiece. A track where the drums march like prophets and the voices whisper warnings into your marrow.

Justin Hicks and Kenita-Miller Hicks join Meshell on vocals, braiding lament with instruction. It’s not grief. It’s prophecy. “There’s trouble,” they sing, not as fear but as fact. Listening feels like entering a church with no pews—just floor, breath, and the hard truth that liberation has never been gentle. This isn’t just a song. It’s a rehearsal for the reckoning.

25. “Man Down” – Rihanna

This song still chills me. Every time. “Man Down” is Rihanna at her most narratively raw, and yet it never over-explains. The reggae backbeat, the Barbadian lilt, the visual clarity of each lyric—it all combines into something mythic. The kind of story you’d find passed down on a veranda, hushed but unsparing.

In the video, the implications are even starker: sexual violence, retaliation, exile. But Rihanna doesn’t frame this as a confession. She sings it like a woman who already knows the consequences. Her accent sharpens. The delivery cuts. It’s one of the few times we watch her slip past the pop persona and into something closer to testimony. And she still sounds gorgeous.

26. “Emakhaya” – Simmy (feat. Da Capo & Sun-El Musician)

The first time I heard Simmy was in Durban, South Africa in 2018—barefoot, salt drying on my skin, watching the ocean keep its secrets. “Emakhaya” hadn’t been released yet, but when it finally dropped two years later, it transported me straight back to that beach. Like memory folding in on itself. Like a portal you didn’t know was open.

The track glides—part house, part hymn, part horizon. Simmy’s voice doesn’t reach for anything. It arrives. And Sun-El’s production moves like warm wind across the back of your neck. There’s no urgency here, only offering. “Emakhaya” means home in Zulu, but the song never points to one location. It suggests that home is a sensation. A return you feel in the body before the mind can name it.

27. “Dance with My Father” – Luther Vandross

BET used to play this video on a loop, and I’d just sit there—nine years old, not yet fluent in grief, but understanding somehow that this was sacred. “Dance with My Father” was the first Luther song I discovered on my own. And it hit like memory passed down in a whisper.

Now that I’m older, the song holds different weight. My father and I have grown into a kind of friendship, and this track has become something of a mirror. It reminds me how love, especially paternal love, isn’t always spoken. Sometimes it’s just rhythm. A hand on your back. A moment you didn’t know was your last.

28. “Wildfires” – SAULT

This is what happens when protest becomes psalm. “Wildfires” dropped in June 2020, right in the thick of global uprisings, and it didn’t shout. It smoldered. Built on a pulse of bass and restraint, it’s a song that refuses to perform pain. Instead, it delivers grief with discipline. Fury with form.

SAULT is a British collective, but everything they do is steeped in the blood-memory of Black musical traditions. “Wildfires” isn’t a single—it’s a sermon disguised as soul. It made me a believer. Not in slogans or saviors, but in sound as resistance. As renewal.

29. “Bibanke” – Asa

“Bibanke” is what happens when heartbreak doesn’t need drama to be devastating. Asa gives us no theatrics here. Just clean, unpretentious sorrow. Her voice never begs—it offers. And what she gives us is the outline of a woman who loved, lost, and still found enough breath to sing softly through it.

This song is light in structure, but heavy in soul. It’s not confession. It’s closure. And the fact that Asa is still making music, still steady in her lane after all these years, brings me joy. Some artists chase the algorithm. Asa remains the truth.

30. “More” – Lawrence Flowers & Intercession

Growing up in the church means you have a gospel memory for every emotion. This one was mine for hunger. “More” is the kind of worship song that doesn’t rely on climax—it builds through longing. It’s less about volume, more about volume of spirit. A simple message: I want more. More discipline. More clarity. More God.

Lawrence Flowers & Intercession blend gospel with rock & soul, but never lose the reverence. Their harmonies lift without strain. Their arrangements demand attention. “More” doesn’t posture. It prays. And for me, it reminds me that the spiritual journey doesn’t end in certainty. It begins in desire.

Honorable Mentions

Some songs didn’t make the final thirty, but they’ve shaped me in quiet, persistent ways—songs I return to often:

“Still” - Seinabo Sey | “Tezeta” - Mulatu Astatke | “Mercy” – Duffy | “Maradona” – Niniola | “Undeniable” – Mat Kearney | “Smokey Mountain Memories” – Dolly Parton | “Viva La Vida” – Coldplay | “Fast Car” – Tracy Chapman | “Aïcha” – Khaled | “Full Moon” – Brandy | “Hometown Glory” – Adele | “Mudimo” - Soweto Gospel Choir | “Vibration” – Fireboy DML | “Free Fallin’” - John Mayor | “One Mic” - Nas | “Indlovu” - DJ Zinhle, Loyiso | “Paris, Tokyo” - Lupe Fiasco | IGO - Peggy Gou | “Seihor” - Castro D’destroyer, D-black | “Vuli Ndela” - Brenda Fassie | “Another Day in Paradise” - Phil Collins | “Ojuelegba” - Wizkid | “(No One Knows Me) - Like the Piano” - Sampha | “Sunday Morning" - Maroon 5 | “Brown Skin” - India.Arie

THE FULL SONIC MEMOIR. 800 SONGS. 54HRS

Apple Music sucks!