A friend recently told me that nothing gets more hits on a webpage than a “top ten” list.  I had no idea.  For a brief moment, I thought, “well, let’s do a whole series, then!”  But, of course, we wouldn’t be prog lovers if we merely went for quantity.  We love quantity only when it’s full of quality.  You know, a 22-minute Big Big Train song, the kind of song that forces a non-prog friend to say to me, “Birzer, I had no idea when I started the song that I’d missed dinner.”

Ok, before I start sound like a really long refrigerator magnet. . . my top 29 prog songs of the past five years.  It’s the best I could do and still feel as though I possess some integrity.

My only rules.  1) The song had to appear in the last five years for the first time.  And, 2) I wouldn’t repeat any band’s appearance in the list.  In alphabetical order:

• Anathema “Universal”
• Ayreon “The Sixth Extinction”
• Big Big Train “The Underfall Yard”
• Cailyn “Nocturne”
• Coheed and Cambria “In Keeping Secrets of the Silent Earth: 3”
• Coralspin “Sons of the Sleeping Giant”
• Cosmograph “The Man Left in Space”
• Days Between Stations “Eggshell Man”
• The Fierce and the Dead “Part 1”
• Flower Kings “Tower ONE”
• Frost* “Wonderland”
• John Galgano, “1000”
• Gazpacho “Tick Tock (Part II)
• Glass Hammer “If the Stars”
• I and Thou “Hide and Seek”
• IZZ “Can’t Feel the Earth, Part II”
• Kingbathmat “Kubrick Moon”
• Leah “Northern Edge”
• Neal Morse “Time Changer”
• No-Man “Truenorth”
• Nosound “Winter Will Come”
• Oceansize “Trail of Fire”
• Reasoning “A Musing Dream”
• Riverside “Escalator Shrine”
• Rush “Clockwork Angels”
• Sanguine Hum “The Trial”
• The Tangent “Where are They Now” (Going Off the Two Version)
• Tin Spirits “Broken”
• Tori Amos “Battle of Trees”
• 3RDegree “The Ones to Follow”