I make no secret of being a big fan of Virgin Steele. They are easily my favourite band of all time. I have a list of their studio albums ranked and I just thought that wasn't enough. So for a ridiculously long time I have been creating this list. When you are ranking so many songs from one band it can get really difficult. You listen to a song you maybe haven't heard in a while and it suddenly jumps 30 places. I am pretty happy with the list though and will change it down the line if and when my opinions change.

I created the list using all of their studio albums and their 2 anniversary compilation albums - The Book Of Burning and Hymns To Victory. Many of the songs on The Book Of Burning are rerecorded and updated versions of older songs from the likes of Guardians Of The Flame. I vastly prefer the reworked versions and I didn't want to have multiple versions of the same songs in this list, so that is why there are several songs listed under The Book Of Burning rather than Guardians Of The Flame. Keeping multiple versions off also meant that there are no new versions of "A Symphony Of Steele" or "Crown of Glory" as found on the Hymns To Victory album. I really like those versions with the altered intros, but I decided to just keep the originals in this one. I also removed any instrumentals under 2 minutes and basic short spoken seques.

Making the list also brought to attention my harsh criticism of Life Among The Ruins and my leniency towards Virgin Steele. It turns out that most of the songs on the former are far superior and looking at the bottom of my list, most of those songs are the same type of song; really shallow and average blues rock songs with David DeFeis squealing every few seconds. I pretty much can't stand that stuff, so those types of songs dominate the bottom of the list. Out of 185 songs, I think I dislike only about 20 at the most, which is impressive. It was far more difficult to rank the top songs and I honestly struggled with the top 50 (which is what this list was originally going to be).

Many of the tracks are only found on reissues and are bonus tracks. I didn't list them here as bonus tracks, but I have listed them under the albums they were reissued with. For example "The Sword Of Damocles" is only found on the reissue double album, which in turn combines both Marriage albums. So here I just listed it under The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell Part II. I tried to include all the songs, but obviously leaving out the repeat songs and acoustic versions etc...it means I might have missed 1 or 2 tracks. So if any big fans notice something is missing, let me know and I'll throw it in.

Finally, this was fun to do and I'll probably do it with some other bands in the future!