Sasha Weiss

Michael Barbaro.

We've had some late nights here.

But fun ones, really fun.

Well, we decided to draw on the wisdom of the crowd.

But not just any crowd.

Not just any crowd.

We wanted to really canvas a lot of different music experts from all walks of life.

So we sent ballads out, of course, to working musicians and songwriters, but also to producers, to label executives, to many generations of music critics, to...

to top editors of music magazines, to scholars, to authors, to DJs, to music supervisors.

So we really tried to go wide.

And in the end, the list that was generated by that balloting process had over 700 individual names.

What followed the balloting process was a second part of the process, which was inviting Times critics and sometimes affiliated critics to come to the Times for a long day of debate.

To slug it out.

Were you in the room?

Oh, yeah.

What was it like?

Passionate, contentious, sometimes heated.

You know, I mean, there were some people who were obvious shoo-ins.

They balloted high above the rest.

Stevie Wonder was one.