I'm going to go by albums as well as songs - it's hard to narrow it down to 10, but my list is more the ones I played over and over, mixed with singles that really floored me - also not in rank order (how can you compare and rank your love for beer and chocolate?):

Foolish Youth
1. For the Roses -Joni Mitchell
2. Tapestry - Carole King
3. Mud Slide Slim - James Taylor
4. Selling England by the Pound - Genesis
5. Brain Salad Surgery -Emerson, Lake and Palmer
6. Liege and Lief - Fairport Convention
7. Turn of the Cards - Renaissance
8. Aqualung - Jethro Tull
9. Abbey Road - The Beatles
10. Bursting at the Seams - The Strawbs
11. Who's Next - The Who
        ("My list goes to eleven...")

Foolish Adulthood - Rock and Pop division
1. Don't Go Back to Rockville - REM
2. Romeo and Juliet - Dire Straits (and most of the rest)
3. Solsbury Hill - Peter Gabriel (and countless others)
4. Dr. Wu - Steely Dan (I have all their albums)
5. Stop Making Sense soundtrack -Talking Heads
6. Graceland (the whole album) - Paul Simon
7. Wall of Death - Richard and Linda Thompson (and 60 zillion other Thompson songs)
8. A Murder of One - Counting Crows
9. Hey, Jack Kerouac - 10,000 Maniacs
10. Is She Really Going Out with Him? - Joe Jackson
11. Oregon Hill - The Cowboy Junkies

Foolish Adulthood - Folk and World division
1. A Cut Above - June Tabor and Martin Simpson
2. Please to See the King - Steeleye Span
3. Byker Hill - Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick
4. Silly Sisters - June Tabor and Maddy Prior
5. To Scratch That Itch - Luaka Bop Sampler
6. The Real Bahamas - mostly Joseph Spence and the Pindars
7. This Way Home - Cindy Kallet
8. Hourglass - Kate Rusby
9. Scatterlings of Africa - Juluka
10. Morris On - Ashley Hutchings et al.
11. most Yazoo sampler albums
and Gordon Bok and Jean Bosco Mwembe and Blind Willie McTell and Shirley Collins and Louis Armstrong and Norman Blake and The Bothy Band and Nic Jones and Peter Bellamy and Muzikas and Bill Kirchen and, and, and - I can't choose just 10 of these!

I find it almost impossible to limit this to just 10 albums, let alone 10 songs - my favorites change over time! There are artists I went on a complete craze for, and now think - "Oh, God - what did I ever like about them?" Mostly, though, I seem to gravitate to moody, depressed songwriters (Richard Thompson, for example). Maybe we should have the fine psychologists at the NYCFTFU analyze our lists...then, again, maybe we shouldn't!