Looking Back is a comprehensive collection of Cinderella's entire career, featuring all of their hits – "Nobody's Fool," "Don't Know What You Got (Till It's Gone)," "The Last Mile," "Coming Home," "Gypsy Road," "Shelter Me" – plus highlights from their inconsistent records, and the previously unreleased "War Stories." The compilation doesn't overlook nearly any of their best songs, and it's hard to imagine that a more thorough retrospective than Looking Back could ever be assembled.
With only four full-length albums and a couple of live records to their name, it's hard to view this 2006 two-disc Cinderella set as being essential, especially as the thorough Rocked, Wired & Bluesed: The Greatest Hits was released early the preceding year. Nevertheless, the two-disc Gold contains almost everything a Cinderella fan could want or possibly need. Almost. For some reason, the group decided to opt for live renditions of two of its most well-known recordings - "Gypsy Road" and "Somebody Save Me" - over the original versions. This flaw aside, Cinderella comb through their other releases to present this 30-song collection of their other hits, including the power ballad "Don't Know What You Got ('Til It's Gone)," the hard-driving "Shake Me," and the MTV favorite "Nobody's Fool."
Extended Versions is a live album by American hard rock band Cinderella. It was recorded on July 21, 2005 at Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Connecticut and released in 2006 by Sony BMG. The album was re-issued in 2009 by Frontiers Records in Europe and Japan under the title Live at the Mohegan Sun, with bonus tracks and a different cover. Gary Corbett was previously a touring keyboard player for Kiss and Paul Stanley.
Cinderella's Rocked, Wired & Bluesed: The Greatest Hits is intended to replace the 1997 compilation Once Upon A … as a full-length, single-disc retrospective on the group. Like Once Upon A …, it contains all eight of Cinderella's Billboard Hot 100 hits and 11 of its 12 entries in Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart. (In both cases, the exception is "Bad Attitude Shuffle.") But the newer collection adds the album tracks "Night Songs" from the debut album of the same name; "Bad Seamstress Blues/Fallin' Apart at the Seams," "Long Cold Winter," and "If You Don't Like It," from the second album, Long Cold Winter, and "Winds of Change" from the third album, Heartbreak Station.
After successful albums that effectively followed contemporary hard rock trends, Cinderella reached back into the Stones and Aerosmith songbooks and created a sneering, raunchy hard rock album that was artistically their finest moment, even if it didn't reach the same commercial heights as its predecessors. But the sales figures don't matter (it only sold a million copies); Heartbreak Station shows that Cinderella has more genuine rock & roll grit than most of the metal bands of the late '80s.
Cinderella returned from their self-imposed exile in late 1994 with Still Climbing, a gritty record that shows them building upon the bluesy hard rock of Heartbreak Station. Arguably, it boasts a more consistent song selection and tougher sound than Heartbreak, yet radio and MTV were resistant to the band's classic good-times-and-hard-rockin' attitude and the record disappeared soon after its release.
Long Cold Winter is a transition album for Cinderella, mixing pop-metal tunes with better hooks than those on Night Songs with a newfound penchant for gritty blues-rock à la the Stones or Aerosmith. The ballads - the grandiose "Don't Know What You Got (Till It's Gone)" and the excellent, lower-key "Coming Home" - are what made the album Cinderella's most commercially successful, but the effective combination of pop hooks and tough, swaggering rock & roll on songs like "Gypsy Road" and "Fallin' Apart at the Seams" prevents the album from becoming simply a vehicle for hit singles and keeps it interesting. Not all of the songs are memorable, but most of them are.
The fairy tale story of Cinderella has always inspired the great theater composers. Rossini's delightful 'La Cenerentola' is an operatic staple while Prokofiev's 'Cinderella' is a fixture on the ballet stage. After the 1940 premiere of 'Romeo and Juliet,' Prokofiev was immediately commissioned to write another ballet for the Kirov. Work on 'Cinderella' was set aside during some of the darkest days of the Second World War but Prokofiev returned to the work and completed it in 1944.