It’s 1999 — I’m working two jobs and finding myself with no money thanks to my record-buying obsession, so I pick up three new jobs. I’m now working five jobs, 60 hours or so a week, going to school, and purchasing as many records as I can get my hands on.

Fast-forward to 2001. Collecting every song from the Top 40 wasn’t really the most difficult thing I’ve done. The majority of them can be found on some CD, somewhere, and if not on the original album then on a reissue, greatest-hits album, or compilation of some sort. The only reason it took me two years is a simple lack of moolah.

The very last song I needed to finish my collection was an interesting one: “Twist and Shout” by the Beatles. Of course I could’ve found that song on a thousand different CDs, but I wanted to find the ’80s release of it — it hit #23 in 1986 thanks to its inclusion in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I must’ve searched for the soundtrack to that movie for six months without any luck before the lightbulb went off in my head that maybe I should find out why. Seems that Ferris’s director, John Hughes, didn’t think the songs in the movie would flow together outside of the movie, so he never released a soundtrack. At that point I purchased the original song from one of those thousand different CDs, and my collection was complete. Or so I thought.

I figured I could end it there, but after going no more than three weeks without purchasing one record, I decided I needed to keep going and expanded my quest to include the entire Billboard Hot 100 chart from the ’80s. So, essentially, I’ve been building up to this series for about seven years now.

Since this is where the fun really begins, we’ll start talking about this challenge next week. In the meantime, we move on to the letter “B.”

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