Daryl

RCA/BMG released their first CD-era comprehensive Hall & Oates collection, The Very Best of Daryl Hall & John Oates, in 2001. It was a single-disc, 18-track collection that contained all of the duo's big hits from the '70s and '80s apart from "She's Gone," which they recorded for Atlantic in the first half of the '70s. Even though that was a major omission, the collection was the best place to get the bulk of the hits until BMG Heritage released Ultimate Daryl Hall + John Oates three years later…

Stocked with all of the hits, as well as a few more deep cuts than 2009's like-minded yet far more ornate and lengthy Do What You Want, Be What You Are: The Music of Daryl Hall & John Oates, this 2014 four-disc box set may not have all of the bells and whistles of its predecessor, but it's got a better price point and would serve most casual fans (and some hardcore ones) well, especially those looking for something a little more substantial than the standard single-disc career overview and a little less expansive than the 74-track Do What You Want, Be What You Are.

Not all the singles are here, but The Singles does include 18 of Daryl Hall & John Oates' best-known songs. It covers the mid-‘70s (beginning with 1974’s “She’s Gone”) through the late ‘80s (ending with 1988’s “Everything Your Heart Desires”) and contains 15 of the duo’s 16 Top Ten singles; “Did It in a Minute” is the lone omission in that respect…

Drawing from Hall & Oates' four Atlantic albums and adding one previously unreleased song, The Atlantic Collection is a definitive overview of the duo's early years…

It's telling that Do What You Want Be What You Are, Sony/Legacy's comprehensive, career-spanning Daryl Hall and John Oates box set, takes its title from a moderately successful mid-'70s single from the duo, written and recorded just as the group was hitting their creative stride. The slow Philly groove of "Do What You Want Be Who You Are" may have hearkened back to the duo's soul roots, side-stepping some of the outré pop experiments they had done just two years earlier on War Babies, but Hall & Oates took the title's sentiment to heart, blurring boundaries between rock, pop, and soul in a way that wasn't always easy to appreciate at the peak of their popularity in the '80s…