31. Run, Leona Lewis (2008)

Two in the morning, this time last year, Neil asleep on the sofa, as always, dead to the world, the same Neil that Barry and I couldn't wake all those years ago as we woke up on the nightbus, daylight shocking us into consciousness, the 259 heading north-east to Waltham Cross, so many miles from home. Now, he snores gently, the backing track to Lucy, his girlfriend of so many years now, and me, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, white wine filling our livers, slowing our drunken limbs, lifting our voices as we flick through the music channels, looking for Leona Lewis.

We found her that night, and that dark, ghostly video, hearing her soft, smoky voice doing something remarkable to that Snow Patrol ballad over and over and over again. Hearing the way she turned it into a strange, doomy requiem, the way she sung that second line – "and now I really have to go" – giving it a sadness and weight that it had never had before. And me sitting here, a friend's arm round my shoulders, in the flat that he had left, all his things still around us, getting some sort of comfort from it. Lucy's arms holding the pieces of me tightly together as everything else cut me through.

30. Spiders (Kidsmoke), Wilco (2004)

This is March 2005, the motorik beat taking me towards the Hammersmith Apollo, the motorik beat giving the room a warm, steady pulse, the motorik beat taking me towards him again. The beers, the eye contact, the bus home, the unscheduled stop. The six months of watching, waiting and hiding, then saying and doing.

This is March 2009, two girls in Seattle about to broach the West Coast. That motorik beat – three times on the radio in only two days, charging around our twin room at the Ace Hotel, our cases spilling with colours, Belltown buzzing outside, pushing us out towards the Public Library, all yellow neon escalators and ruby red rooms, to Ivo's House Of Clams, shot glasses glimmering with oysters, to the Public Market, the Redwood, the Bauhaus, the Space Needle.

It returning briefly in Portland, like a happy echo. A motorik beat saying so much about him and the life I once had, and the life, once again, that I was about to take back.

29. Ghost Hardware, Burial (2007)

The sound of winter. Cold winds. The walk from Penton Street through the N1 Centre, my wet feet on grey paving, a silver crown of thorns suspended in the air. The bus home, the sky black, the voices cutting in, swirling into my ears like water into a plughole. An album so chilly but also comforting, bleak but also bracing, stitching all the sounds from the city effortlessly together, and this track in particular, the one Rob and I would play every morning in the office before it filled with clatter and noise, now taking me home. The two-step rhythms the sound of an approaching train on the North London Line, the swooshes its doors opening, the ghostly vocals in its corners the angels on my shoulders, taking me into the crowd, holding me closely, taking me to the East.

28. Come On Let's Go, Broadcast (2000)

I bought The Noise Made By People when I lived in 76 Alexandra Gardens, the first home in London that I loved. It was a strange ground-floor four-room flat on a steep, angled road in Muswell Hill – just across from the palace, down the road from The Green Man – and I adored it more than life itself, for some reason. It was tiny and poky and the kitchen smaller than a stamp, but it had little things about it that I just got lost in. The fairylit bedroom that I mentioned earlier, with a brick-built fireplace in the corner holding a wicker basket of fake sunflowers. The fridge full of Steve's leftover pizza from La Porchetta, which Alex and I would nibble like rabbits. The three little steps down to the living room that she would jump down, bang-bang-BANG, the big Casablanca poster we got framed for too much money, which broke as we used it to fight against the wind on the journey home. The sofa where the three of us would squish through that summer of 2000, watching This Life on repeat and the first series of Big Brother, the same sofa where Alex would sit alone one year later, on an afternoon in September, watching two planes endlessly crashing into two silver towers.

Around this time, I met a man. I forget his name now, but I remember he had a bowl haircut, thick glasses, and was a bit older than me – no, it wasn't like that. I can't remember how we met either, but I remember he wanted someone to sing in his new band. We both liked Broadcast and late '60s music, so I thought that was a good sign, and then he asked me to make a tape of me singing some songs.

I still remember how odd that felt. I didn't know what to do. This was something that other people did – people in proper bands, people with confidence. I picked up my mum's guitar – dusty, lovely and strong, as it still is, its lovely 1969 strings slowly bruising my fingers. I strummed along to something by Portishead, I think, and also this song, making sure every note was perfect. It felt weird and wayward, so I hid behind my fringe to press record, and shyly press stop.

I sent him the tape. Some weeks passed. Then some more. And then he finally replied, saying that my guitar-playing style suggested I didn't understand real music, and no one else would think I did either. So when I look at my mum's guitar in the corner of the room now – its strings reaching middle age this year, the dust even thicker – I still apologise to the poor, beautiful thing. But I also still sing this song in the shower every now and then, hoping the man with glasses and bowl hair has seen my byline picture in the Guardian, and I blow him a raspberry.

27. Shelter, the xx (2009)

Because it's sometimes too simple to look back and look far. Too easy to forget the songs, and the feelings, that have come into life lately. A dark room in the ICA, four shy teenagers, their music so spacious, every tiny part of it shining with magic, with light, and with power. The album in the kitchen, again, again, again, the first one for years to have that sort of impact, the sad, country guitar sounds, the electronics, the darkness, the sink filling with water, over my hands, over the sides, to the floor, as I stood there, captured by it, letting it in.

Sometimes I think that music is an agent of witchcraft, a spell – it can wipe our minds clean, it almost will us to merge with it. It makes me feel just like Shelter suggests – "Could I be? Was I there?/ It felt so crystal in the air". Hearing it in my kitchen, in Dan's living room, on my headphones, in the Hoxton Hall, in the Village Underground, in the Bowery Ballroom, and it taking me away, burrowing me inside it, every time. Hearing Romy singing, "Please teach me gently/How to breathe", my chest rising for her.

26. Starlings, Elbow (2008)

The day I got a phone call from the people behind the Mercury Music Prize, I thought somebody was having a laugh. We'd like you to be a judge, said the nice chap on the phone, but first you have to meet me for a pint in a pub. Surely this was a wind-up. But then I met the lovely Kevin over lagers and cheese and onion crisps, he said why they wanted me, he said what it involved – listening to mountains of CDs for no money, but for other glorious rewards, like a great time, free records, and a lifetime being slagged off by people on newspaper comment boards – and this woman, bowled over, gave a huge, beaming yes.

2007 was a strange year to start. New-rave was fluttering its brightly coloured sleeves at the time, and the Klaxons scooped the prize, to mixed reviews – and yes, the album I loved belly-flopped before the final hurdle. A year later, however, the opposite happened. The Seldom-Seen Kid leapt over it elegantly, smiled at the crowd, and made the finishing line with a big, burly flourish.

The record still gets better every time I hear it, each track holding its own, special magic, but Starlings is the song that still grabs me by the scruff of the neck. The fluttering beat, like a heart waking up, those thick vocal harmonies rising up slowly, and the soft, simple piano figure whirring the song into action, before brass is suddenly shaking us, BLASTING US into life. Then the story unfurls beautifully. There's the humour of Guy Garvey's complaints about the Premier ignoring his invitations; the way he says "bunch" in that big, Bury gulp; the dreams about marriages in orange groves; the brilliant idea of asking your beloved to "back a horse that's good for glue", and the perfect rhythms of one of the sweetest couplets ever committed to melody – "You are the only thing/In any room you're ever in".

Then the flocks of starlings circling as he looks into her eyes, the understated perfection of the murmured "Darling, is this Love?", that blast again, suddenly louder, more true. The idea of romance infused with reality being so much more romantic; the language of love, plain, dirty and simple, flavoured with alcohol and cigarettes, blood, sweat and tears.

When Elbow won that September, everyone was overjoyed. I had to talk on TV for ten seconds about how wonderful they were, so I babbled a bit, full of happiness and wine. I then watched the band speak to Lauren Laverne, and as they walked off – me being bolstered by booze – I grabbed Garvey by the arm. I told him I was a judge, that I was over the moon, and could I give him a hug – such a terrible, embarrassing fan-girl thing to do. Thankfully, he said yes. He cuddled me back like a big, lovely bear, but dropped his wine glass as he did so, and I was asked by an official, passing by, to get him another.

I can still see Garvey defending my honour, even more full of happiness and wine than me. "SHE'S A JUDGE", he sang brightly, sounding even more precious than he did on record. "She can do whatever she FUCKING WELL LIKES". Not exactly "Come with me, sweetheart, to an island made for two", but a defence nonetheless, and one that he finished with an extra squeeze of my arm, another kiss on my cheek. Thinking of it now, I'm still smiling, the starlings still circling, and the victory lap is still ours for the taking.

25. Finisterre, Saint Etienne (2002)

In 2007, I was starting to get sick of the city I loved. I was bored of endless bus journeys, tired of long trips on the tube, dreaming of the kind of life that I could have outside it. Less noise, less clamour, less sirens, less everything. So one day, I didn't stop at my bus stop in Hackney. I didn't run down the steps when I reached Bethnal Green either. I looked straight ahead, and I kept on walking.

I fell in love with London again by finding it on foot. I fell in love with London again by making it mine.

It was like watching the world open up in front of me. I found gorgeous places in Angel, minutes from where I had worked for four years at The Word, which I had never seen before. I looked more closely at buildings, shop fronts and street corners; I would catchy new specks of life along rivers and canals; I would find secret shortcuts along little lanes, and I felt like these were my secrets that I was weaving within. Soonafter, I started listening to music to accompany my journeys. I would dig out old albums from dusty shelves in my living room, trying to find songs that matched the rhythms of my feet, the thrum of my pulse, the soft, forward motions of my big, soppy heart.

And while I was walking, I found Finisterre again. I'd never really got on with the album it came from the first time around, but its title track made sense on those cold, wintry mornings on the way to edit pages, my earphones snug in my lugs, carrying my big belted coat through the wind and the rain. Those looping, meshing pianos and harps as it started, weaving a web of romance and excitement; that strange synthesiser melody coming straight after it, like the welcoming embrace of a '70s educational programme; Sarah Cracknell standing alone, speaking for us.

As I pounded the pavements, she was speaking for me. "Sometimes I walk home through a network of car parks just because I can", she said, lifting wonderful freedoms from the everyday. She loved "the feeling of being slightly lost/Defining spaces, new routes, new areas". Like me, she also believed that music, "in the long run, straightens out most things"; in "love over cynicism"; in skyscrapers, Electrelane, Beau Brummell and Bauhaus; the "notion of a perfect city" revealing itself.

As the song ended, Sarah would sing, "I want to know the whole of the city with you", a bright beaming sound among the noise, clamour and sirens. I would take these words with me as I walked through the city I was slowly remembering. I would watched them blaze in the streetlights, and in the dark sky, for all of us.