A couple of weeks back, I posted a week’s worth of songs that fun. guitarist Jack Antonoff listed as essential in the Rolling Stone Guest List column.

Naturally, I wondered which five songs I would pick if asked to contribute to the same sort of list. This week I’ll give my answer.

There is no such thing, for me at least, as a top five, top ten or even top fifty “favorite songs” list. My favorites are fluid depending on my mood. A burst of pop adrenaline might sound like perfection one day and overkill the next. So I wouldn’t consider this a list of favorites.

Instead, these five songs are the first that came to mind when I reached back for musical moments that stopped me in my tracks.

Initially I aimed for a diversity in styles and sounds but in the end, naturally, I wound up with a bunch of melancholy tracks. A tiger can’t change its stripes.

First up is Fiona Apple’s ‘I Know,’ the closing track of her sophomore album When the Pawn…. Like all of the songs featured this week, this one has been a SOTD in the past (my 13th, in fact), so I’m going with a live version.

Though I was mesmerized by the whole When the Pawn… album, ‘I Know’ was the song that made me truly appreciate Apple as a composer and performer. I’d never heard anything quite like it, and I still haven’t.