As soon as we decided to make a list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters, we could guess how readers would respond to the results: with a combination of enthusiasm and outrage, quickly letting us know which of their favorites we had unconscionably forgotten. We didn’t want all that passion to go undocumented. So we invited readers to assemble their own list in a formal poll. More than 25,000 ballots were cast, producing nearly 12,000 distinct choices. We spent weeks combing through the votes to tabulate the results. Finally, here they are: the top 100 songwriters, according to our readers. They’re annotated throughout with facts, testimonials and interesting patterns we noticed in the data. Read more about the list and the songwriters voters think we missed at the link in our bio.