On April 21, Capitol/UMe will release a new career-spanning collection of top hits by one of music's most legendary and acclaimed groups, the Bee Gees. The Bee Gees' Timeless: The All-Time Greatest Hits features 21 tracks personally selected by Bee Gees co-founder Barry Gibb and sequenced in chronological order. The CD and digital collection spans decades of Bee Gees smash hits, from their first Australian chart-topper, 1966's "Spicks and Specks" to "How Deep Is Your Love," "Night Fever," and "Stayin' Alive" from Saturday Night Fever to 1987's UK Number One single "You Win Again."
The listener is immediately convinced, from the opening a cappella bits of "Only the Lonely," that no one conveys pain and longing more sublimely or succinctly than Roy Orbison. But his songs are also masterpieces of production: so technically precise that his deceptively simple tunes and lush melodies flow even more smoothly behind his desperate baritone croon and quivering falsetto…
Lynyrd Skynyrd's 2000 compilation All Time Greatest Hits suffers from the same ailments that plague many compilations of its time, but there is one problem in particular that hurts it: instead of offering all of the "all time greatest hits" on one disc, the compilers pulled their punches, overlooking a few big songs while occasionally substituting live or acoustic versions for the original studio versions. That means that this is a Skynyrd compilation without the famed original recording of "Free Bird" – a live version is here instead. It doesn't really matter that it's a good version, taken from 1976's One More from the Road, or that the live version actually charted in the Top 40; nor does it matter that "All I Can Do Is Write About It" is a good acoustic version originally released on the eponymous 1991 box set, because this is a collection made for a general audience. It should, therefore, have the versions that a general audience knows best. Apart from that, and the usual nitpicking over songs that should have been included ("Workin' for MCA," "Don't Ask Me No Questions," etc.), this remains a solid collection, containing most of the Skynyrd material that a casual follower could want.
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.