Hey Mike, great list. We were obviously spending a lot of time together in the 80's; lots of common ground for me in there. Although some of them I'll admit didn't (and don;t) do much for me - Dire Straits, for example; Brothers in Arms felt like the end of a band I had once liked.

There were a few others that I was listening to a ton at that time that I'd forgotten about, and something about your post reminded me; World Party's Private Revolution; Guadalcanal Diary's Jamboree, Let's Active's Cypress.

I will put my thoughts together into a list this week. Kind of a fun exercise, because my impression of the eighties is that it hasn't aged well, and yet (a) it was a hugely defining period for all of us musically, and (b) it is (somewhat inevitably) coming back into vogue and so the only-recently kitschy sounding production / sensibilities are very popular again. Useful to go through ti, because I know it will warm me up to some music I once loved.