Nelson Riddle Linda Ronstadt

If Rhino had merely combined Linda Ronstadt's Greatest Hits, Vol. 1 and volume two, they would have a compilation that captured her at her peak. They didn't do that for 2002's The Very Best of Linda Ronstadt, but they did follow that basic blueprint very closely, with 16 of the 21 songs culled from her '70s heyday, with the remaining five drawing from her late-'80s/early-'90s adult contemporary comeback, including "Don't' Know Much" and "Somewhere out There." That these songs don't quite fit musically with the laid-back Californian soft rock of the '70s doesn't matter, nor does it matter that her excursions into other genres – her traditional pop albums with Nelson Riddle, her Mexican records, her country albums with Trio – are missing ("Different Drum" with the Stone Poneys is here), because this collection expertly delivers her biggest hits in an enjoyable fashion with very little fat. Those original hits records remain first-rate, but it's nicer to get all of these on one disc instead of two.

Linda Ronstadt's generically titled four-CD, five-hour, 86-track box set retrospective attempts with considerable success to encompass the many types of music she's sung from the mid-'60s to the late '90s. The album is divided into five unequal parts, with 31 tracks given over to an "Album Retrospective," followed by seven tracks from "The Nelson Riddle Sessions," her three albums of classic pop, then five songs "En Español," drawn from her three Spanish language albums. That takes up the first two discs, with the third disc consisting of 20 "Collaborations" and the fourth 23 "Rarities".

The series was revived as "AM Gold" in 1995, with a different cover design (early volumes had an artist's drawing of a pocket transistor radio, with later volumes bearing a "gold record" with the year or era spotlighted emblazoned over the top). The first 20 volumes were re-titled issues of volumes from the former "Super Hits" series with identical track lineups, while new volumes covering the mid- and late-1970s (including individual volumes for each of the years 1974-1979) were included.