Era The Very

The Very Best of Marianne Faithfull' is a particularly strong collection of Marianne's earliest recordings made for Decca between 1964 to 1968. This album contains every one of her singles which made the charts both in Britain and America during those fruitful four years.

It speaks well for the continued viability of their catalog (probably second only to Bob Dylan's among '60s folk artists) that this is only the sixth compilation ever done on Peter, Paul & Mary's music in four decades of musical activity - and since one of the others was a Readers' Digest mail-order release and two of the others were done for special markets outside of the United States, that low number is downright astonishing. This release effectively supplants the perennially popular Ten Years Together: The Best of Peter, Paul & Mary, from 1970, and also outdoes the 2003 WEA International Very Best Of, with more songs drawn from a much wider chunk of their history as well. The material at hand covers not only most of the key singles and a handful of important album tracks by the trio from the 1960s, but also acknowledges their less widely heard solo material from the 1970s…

Iconic American vocalist of the 1940s and '50s blurred the line between pop and jazz.
Before the rock & roll revolution, Rosemary Clooney was one of the most popular female singers in America, rising to superstardom during the golden age of adult pop. Like many of her peers in the so-called "girl singer" movement - Doris Day, Kay Starr, Peggy Lee, Patti Page, et al. - Clooney's style was grounded in jazz, particularly big-band swing. She wasn't an improviser or a technical virtuoso, and lacked the training to stand on an equal footing with the greatest true jazz singers. However, she sang with an effortless, spirited swing, and was everything else a great pop singer of her era should have been…

There's one thing wrong with The Very Best of Daryl Hall & John Oates, and it's minor – the promotional 12" mix of "Adult Education" is included in favor of the 7" version. This isn't a big deal and it doesn't mar what is the best overview of Hall & Oates' RCA years, the era when they became the biggest-selling duo in the history of rock…

Dokken was one of the finest bands to come out of the Los Angeles hair metal scene of the '80s, and The Very Best of Dokken proves it. Don Dokken was a terrific singer, and guitarist George Lynch's splashy fretwork was a superb fit…