Greatest Hits The First Ten Years

It’s been a long 16 years since Bon Jovi was last compiled, when Cross Road arrived for the holiday season of 1994, two years after Keep the Faith capped off a near-decade long run of dominance for the Jersey rockers. As it turned out, it was the first act of Bon Jovi’s career. A subdued second act followed in the ‘90s, with Jon Bon Jovi flirting with a solo career once again before returning to the fold late in the decade, with the band setting out for a decade of professionalism, sometimes cresting into the charts – usually with the assist of a canny country crossover – sometimes not. Greatest Hits condenses the highlights of this journey in a mere 16 songs, just two longer than Cross Road – its simultaneously released cousin, Ultimate Greatest Hits, adds a disc with 12 additional songs – and two of those are new tunes that are unlikely to show up on any subsequent best of.

Born on 28 november 1956 in Massa, Italy, Roberto Zanetti studied piano at the age of 14. Had his first hit in 1978: Souvenir, with the band Santarosa, which sold 200,000 copies in Italy.
In 1983 he launched his own group, Taxi (with Zucchero "Sugar" Fornaciari) and released the single To Miami.
He had chosen the Savage alias based on the comic character Doc Savage and composed one of the most popular Italo-Disco slow tracks: Don't Cry Tonight.

Arriving 12 years after LeAnn Rimes' first Greatest Hits collection but more importantly just after she closed out her long-running contract with Curb, All-Time Greatest Hits rounds up 20 highlights from her nearly 20 years with the label. Most of these – 13, to be precise – can be found on Greatest Hits and not all of the additional seven were charting hits; "Amazing Grace" was never released as a single and "The Right Kind of Wrong" is pulled from the Coyote Ugly soundtrack. Those other five are highlighted by the Top Ten hits "Something's Gotta Give," "Probably Wouldn't Be This Way," and "Nothin' 'Bout Love Makes Sense," all of which showed up in the years immediately after 2003's Greatest Hits. The latest single here is "Nothin' Better to Do," which came out in 2007, and that's a fair reflection of Rimes' past decade. After 2007, she released several albums, many of them quite good, but for a variety of reasons they weren't hits. This concentrates on the radio songs people know, and it's better for it.

As the sixth domestic Aerosmith hits collection and the first to feature selections from both their Columbia and Geffen years (not to mention that it's the second double-disc retrospective released within eight months), The Ultimate Aerosmith Hits should live up to its title – and it does, for the most part…

The titles of hits compilations always deal in superlatives: "Greatest," "Best," "Very Best" – but the compilers of this ABBA collection have a special problem justifying the release of yet another such album after the multi-platinum success of 1992's ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits and its 1993 follow-up, More ABBA Gold: More ABBA Hits. (Indeed, the band was never shy about repackaging, issuing a Greatest Hits LP in 1976 as only its third U.S. album, followed by Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 in 1979 and The Singles [The First Ten Years] in 1982.) They have settled on The Definitive Collection and done their best to live up to the name. The 37-track double CD contains "for the first time exclusively collected in one package, each and every single as conceived and released by ABBA and their record company Polar Music between 1972 and 1982," writes annotator Carl Magnus Palm.