So I have to be honest: assembling our Best of the Decade list was incredibly intimidating.

Best of each year? No problem. The scope is smaller, we all have a fair idea of which records should be included, and the squabbles about placement are more fun, more relaxed.

But Best of the Decade? Man oh man. I was surprised at how tough it was, and how many times the list was re-jiggered until it felt something close to right. And even then!

I’m happy to announce that we’ve begun rolling out our list in the US today (UK, EU and CA begins 11/23) — you can get a look at 100 – 81 here. Looking at it now, I really do feel like the list reflects our singular, obstinate taste. Where else will you see a list where Olof Arnalds appears between Ciara and Usher?

But our coverage extends past a simple list. We’ve asked all of our columnists to contribute a page to our eMusic Yearbook. Each writer was assigned a different year in the decade, and each one wrote about the music they felt defined that year. We begin with Hua Hsu’s take on the year 2000 here.

And that’s not all! We’ve also compiled 8 themed lists to make sure that no albums fall through the cracks — lists that focus specifically on breakthroughs in hard rock and metal, classical, hip-hop and a few other surprise spins of our choosing. We’ve also got the Decade’s Best Audiobooks, posting one week from today.

As always, we come to you for feedback — as the list rolls out, let us know: what are your favorites? What albums do you think we were crazy to include? And what albums were we crazier to leave out?

For perhaps the first time in a long time, I didn’t really obsess over compiling my year-end Top 20 this year. There are a number of reasons for this — I felt like most of my choices were pretty well-represented by the eMusic list, and I felt like every other year-end albums poll was declining in significance (both personally and globally).

Old habits die hard, though, and I ended up throwing together a Top 20 at the last minute just to satisfy myself, and to tie up my 2008 listening habits with a tidy little bow. I don’t think I need too much more preamble — below the cut is the first half of my Top 20 Albums of 2008

20. Taylor Swift, Fearless
So to cut right to the chase: I love mainstream pop music as much as I love independent music. I’ve always had kind of restless tastes, and I don’t see much need to rule out certain albums just because they were produced under the aegis of corporate rock. I get as frustrated with knee-jerk “all pop sucks!” declarations as I do with the noodle-headed trolls who plague our message boards around this time every year. Music is music, and I don’t see any reason why a person can’t like Okkervil River and Gorgoroth and Rihanna and Barrington Levy and Unrest. There is perhaps no greater irritant to the eMusic community than Taylor Swift; day in and day out her debut sits atop our charts, elbowing aside other indie albums that are perhaps a bit better and generally misrepresenting our catalog to people who happen to stumble in unawares. Here’s the thing about Taylor Swift, though: she’s a fucking great pop songwriter. The songs on Fearless go straight for the heart, capturing all the nervousness and vulnerability of adolescence, summoning effortlessly those feelings of first love and first heartbreak. That her knack for a hook and startlingly nimble prose gets consistently dismissed is a bit frustrating. To put it another way: it’s awfully easy to dismiss something as “just a pop record” when you’ve never tried to write one yourself.

19. Panic at the Disco, Pretty, Odd
I would argue that there is a whole lot on this record that eMusic regulars would love. Far from the theater-dork emo that characterized their debut, Pretty, Odd gets its marching orders from Sgt. Pepper. It’s a brash, bright psych-pop masterpiece, as intricate and nuanced as anything by the Elephant 6 collective with bigger hooks and brainier lyrics.

18. Al Green, Lay It Down
The Al Green comeback record people have been promising for the last few years finally arrives. Sweet, subtle, soulful and masterfully controlled, Lay It Down sounds like some late-game sequel to Al’s timeless Belle Album. I have played the title track for countless people, all of whom initially refuse to believe it’s not some lost B-Side from the ’70s. Green’s voice is as heavenly as ever, and the songs here burrow deep into the heart. A treasure.

17. Sam Phillips, Don’t Do Anything
I’ve been arguing that Sam Phillips has been unjustly underrated for years now. This is another haunting collection of folk songs, delivered in Phillips’ inimitable Goth drawl. It’s like Kristin Hersh, only darker. Mostly a protracted rumination on her divorce from T-Bone Burnett, Phillips dives down deep into the black water and doesn’t come up for air once.

16. The Foreign Exchange, Leave it All Behind
I kept waiting for this record to catch on at eMusic, and it never happened. D’Angelo-style neo-soul boasting surprisingly fluid and flexible vocals by Little Brother’s Phonte. This is pure midnight love, the kind of record you put on when you have a long night of, ahem, business ahead of you. It works just fine in the daytime, too. It’s not so much a collection of songs as it is one protracted groove.

15. Rotten Sound, Cycles
Finnish death metal done right. This is my white-knuckle terror pick of ’08, 70-second songs that hammer and hammer and hammer and then stop short. A few years ago, there was a Weekly World News story about a bunch of scientists in Alaska who were trying to record the sound of the earth’s core when they drilled too deep and, according to the esteemed Weekly World News, ended up recording Hell. This record is what I’d imagine that tape sounds like.

14. <3 Svanvhit!, Parti a Island
If someone, somehow could get <3 Svanvhit! (pronounced 'Mee-na ah Three Svan-Queet', and meaning "less than three white swans") to SXSW, they would be next year's can't miss indie-rock sweethearts. To see this band live is to fall in love with them — they are wound up, rambunctious Icelandic teenagers, and their live set is absolute energy. I have seen them transform whole rooms in Reykjavik, and watched waves of joy crash over crossed-arm cynics. They are a force of nature, one of the best bands I've seen live in the last 5 years. It is agonizing — agonizing! — that they are never going to get the attention they deserve. Their debut, Parti a Island, for now only available as a CD-R with a hand-crafted cardboard sleeve, goes far to capture that exuberance. Cockeyed pop that recalls Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, <3 Svanhvit! are the remedy that po-faced indie rock so desperately needs. Someone, please, sign this band.

13. Okkervil River, The Stand-Ins
I said my piece about this record in my eMusic review, so I probably don’t need to go on much further. I came around on this band recently, thanks to some impassioned electioneering by Maris, and am sad I waited so long to discover them. Will Sheff is a cunning lyricist, and his prose is scalpel-sharp. For me, The Stand-Ins handily bests its predecessor, but I think I am alone in that camp.

12. Breathe Owl Breathe, Ghost Glacier
I love these songs — pure, childlike, stirring and deeply, deeply moving. Anyone who does not get goosebumps from “Playing Dead” should check for a pulse

11. Black Mountain, In the Future
I know a lot of people cooled on this record, but to me this is blacklight rock at its best, humid as pot clouds and laid-back as a high school burnout. Since I was a dork in high school, I am living vicariously through this record. Real burnouts would probably hear this and laugh. And then knock my books out of my hand and punch me in the stomach.

10. Gaslight Anthem, The 59 Sound
The debate rages in the user reviews about whether or not we are all on dope for picking this as our number one. My response to those accusations goes like this: “Miles Davis & the Cool.”

I know that everyone understandably wants to talk about the technology improvements to eMusic today, but there’s another cool new feature I wanted to mention: our list of the best albums of the year so far. You can read it here.

Hopefully you aren’t too list-weary after last week’s big best albums ever brouhaha, but we’re really excited about these 2008 albums. They go pretty solidly across the spectrum, and feature a lot of the titles you would expect, with hopefully quite a few that you would not. Please let us know how you feel about this list, and below share what we missed!

Also, like the best albums list, there are varying lists by territory. The link above is for the US list, and here is the UK list and the EU list.

The list is complete. We have four different number ones. Four very different top tens. And a whole bunch of amazing records that I hope will clog your save for later list for months to come. So, what are your thoughts? Anything underrated or overrated? Album you are surprised to see made the list or did not make the list? And which list most represents your tastes? Let us know!

Another day, another batch of your votes. In the US, today’s list is particularly great, especially the Darker Than Blue compilation — long a favorite of mine — shockingly coming in so high. I had no clue that so many people love that record, but I’m ecstatic that they do! Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein is another classic, as is Fugazi’s Argument. And maybe the biggest surprise of this whole poll for me is Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator), which did extremely well in pretty much every territory. It’s a gorgeous record for sure. View the whole list here!

Time to check in again on our best albums ever list: numbers 80 through 61 are now up for viewing here. This section is a bit more canonical (though I must admit that I was hoping #78 would place a bit higher than it did) than the last, but trust me: our list is plenty weird.

UK, Canada and Europe results are now up as well. That Europe list? Really, really weird, and way all over the place. Europeans get many bonus points for eclecticism (and for putting Drive Like Jehu on there).