Confession: I have a love/hate relationship with greatest hits compilations. I think it’s because I stumbled into adolescence during the tail end of the Vinyl Era, when it was generally believed that the vehicle for artistic success in music was the studio album. Sure, singles are a great way to lure the newbies in, and live albums are a nice treat for the diehards, but it’s the album meticulously crafted in the studio that gets all the accolades and ultimately creates an artist’s audience. And greatest hits albums? At best, they’re a gimmick. At worst, they’re cynically designed cash cows, a way to satisfy a record contract while separating the gullible consumer from a few of his/her hard earned dollars.

     Fair to say none of the above is true anymore. In today’s streaming age most listeners just play the hits, clicking on their favorite tracks again and again, like dopamine-crazed mice in a lab experiment. Now the studio album only holds appeal for the middle-aged and nostalgia fetishists. I so happen to be a member of both camps, and can therefore count the number of greatest hits compilations in my post-streaming collection on two hands.

     So…when is a greatest hits collection a good thing? Moreover, when should you be tempted to pick up an artist’s greatest hits package as opposed to one of their studio offerings? Looking at my own collection, I was able to come up with seven rationales that fit every greatest hits album I had bothered to purchase. As a bit of a public service, I will present them here:

1. The band in question is essentially a singles act. 

            Best example from my collection: The Carpenters—The Singles: 1969-1973

     I love The Carpenters. As a child of the 70’s I grew up on “Close to You,” mooned over “Rainy Days and Mondays,” and felt sad and lonely while listening to “I Need To Be In Love.” I have fond memories of watching the TV biopic of Karen Carpenter starring Cynthia Gibb, and sought out Todd Haynes’ delightfully weird Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story on YouTube. But I have never, ever, spent as much as one minute poring over deep cuts on A Song For You. I bet nobody else has, either. The Carpenters strength was not the breadth of their work, but the greatness of their singles. They were made for a greatest hits collection, and The Singles 1969-1973 is a damn good one¹. Other artists that you can buy a singles compilation and feel you’ve got the best of their work: Commodores/Lionel Ritchie, K.C. and the Sunshine Band, Little River Band, Ambrosia, and to a lesser extent, Neil Diamond².

2. The band in question doesn’t have one or two classic albums that I’m dying to buy, so it makes more sense to have a representative sample of their work.

            Best example from my collection: The White Stripes— Greatest Hits

     I discovered The White Stripes via a dubbed cassette of White Blood Cells my sister gave me. I thought the whole thing swung pretty hard (I especially liked the manic intensity of “Hotel Yorba”) and followed the band through the early oughts, enjoying most of what I heard. I had a couple of their albums on compact disc, but when I started collecting vinyl a few years ago, I couldn’t settle on an album I really loved more than the others. Jack White made it easy for me when The White Stripes released Greatest Hits five years ago, a two-disc compilation that is one-stop shopping for all but the most ardent fans. There are several songs included from all six of the Stripes studio albums, along with a couple non-album singles. The only song that didn’t make the cut I really miss is “Black Math,” an especially primal piece of garage rock off Elephant. Another artist who fashioned a greatest hits compilation that effectively surveys their career is New Order, whose Substance gathers all of the high points from the first six years of their existence³ in 12-inch versions that improve on those already excellent tracks. 

3. I’m not sure what the band in question’s best albums are, so I’ll buy a greatest hits compilation for my collection until I figure it out.

           Best example from my collection: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers—Greatest Hits

If you grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, I would assume you find Tom Petty at least mildly enjoyable. You couldn’t escape him— Petty had ten Top Twenty hits in his career, and 48 singles that made the Mainstream Rock charts (the only one with more is U2). I have appreciated both singles and album tracks from up and down his discography, and feel he is the best purveyor of that “heartland rock sound”⁴ this side of Springsteen. However, I have no idea what his best album is. Wildflowers is the critical favorite, and Full Moon Fever is also well loved by both fans and critics, but I haven’t listened closely to either of them. Petty has a large discography— 17 albums! — and I need to spend some time with it before I decide what studio albums I want to add to my collection. In the meantime, I’m really glad Greatest Hits is on my shelves. There’s a reason it has sold almost four times as many copies as Wildflowers (Petty’s best selling studio album); it’s remarkably consistent, and has enough guitar licks and singalong choruses to keep even the casual Tom Petty fan happy. It even appends two then-new songs, one of which, “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” became a hit (#14 on the Billboard chart) and a Petty classic. The only drawback to the collection is what it can’t include, as Petty released seven more albums after Greatest Hits, including Wildflowers. I’ll eventually do a deep dive into Petty’s work and figure out which of his studio albums to prioritize for future purchase. 

4. The greatest hits albums is a placeholder.

Best example from my collection: Steely Dan—Greatest Hits 

Steely Dan’s run in the 70’s was incredibly impressive. I think every album from 1972’s Can’t Buy A Thrill through 1977’s Aja has its champions, and no one was doing jazz-influenced rock during this period as well as the Dan did. I will eventually have to get several of their albums for my vinyl collection— no one Steely Dan album adequately tells their story—but when I found a used copy of Greatest Hits online for cheap, I snapped it up. Greatest Hits was how I first came to Steely Dan, via an extended play cassette I listened to so much I wore it out. Ostensibly a singles collection, it includes a gaggle of songs that never made the Top Forty, as well as a number of important deep cuts like “Any Major Dude” and “Doctor Wu,” which is my favorite Steely Dan song. It served as a great introduction to the band and whetted my appetite for more of their work, which is what any good compilation should do. For now, it will suffice whenever I’m spinning records and need a Dan fix.

5. The band in question had a large number of great songs that weren’t on their studio albums.

Best example from my collection: Joy Division—Substance

I already mentioned this album in the footnotes (you do read the footnotes, don’t you?) but it’s worth bringing up again: the Joy Division version of Substance not only catalogs two discs of essential singles you can’t find elsewhere, it presents a version of the band that is much more poppy and accessible than is displayed on their studio albums. Nearly half of the most-streamed songs on Spotify by the band are from Substance, and when I hear a Joy Division song in a movie or on television, it’s invariably from this album. “Love Will Tear us Apart” is the catchiest song the band ever recorded and “Atmosphere” is the prettiest; both are a far remove from the dark dirges and angular rockers that fill up most of Unknown Pleasures and Closer. I love Joy Division’s studio work but appreciate the band was multifaceted enough to create a singles comp that undermines (if only a bit) their brooding mythos⁵; it is therefore a treasured member of my collection. 

6. The greatest hits album has a unique conception that makes it appealing.

Best example from my collection: Hits Are for Squares— Sonic Youth

I am as susceptible to a clever gimmick as the best of them, and that applies to greatest hits collections, too. Hits Are for Squares was originally released by the coffee chain Starbucks as one of those cds you could buy while picking up your latte, and was intended, supposedly, for the casual consumer. I can’t imagine Sonic Youth appealing to too many casual listeners, but I do like how the tracks for this album were selected—all of the songs were hand-picked by different celebrities (writers, musicians, and actors) who provided a blurb about why they loved the song they chose. It’s a fine collection, and the method of track selection makes it both accessible and surprisingly quirky, including some of my favorite Sonic Youth songs (such as “Shadow of a Doubt” and their cover of The Carpenters “Superstar”). The band Spoon used a similar trick when they assembled the songs for All the Weird Kids Up Front (Mas Rolas Chidas)—they had fans vote for which songs made the compilation. And it works—I found it a much more interesting collection than the conventional greatest-hits album Spoon released at the same time.

7. The greatest hits album in question is so iconic it is irresistable.

Best examples from my collection: Decade— Neil Young 

                                                           Chronicle— Creedence Clearwater Revival

If you have any interest in classic rock, I’m betting you have a copy of Chronicle in some physical format. The ultimate party record (and a great road trip album), Chronicle lovingly assembles 20 singles that range in quality from very good to great, including such classics as “Fortunate Son,” “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” and…really, I don’t need to list these— Creedence released six albums between 1968 and 1970, and most people won’t be able to name one song on any of those albums that wasn’t on Chronicle. The two-disc compilation never flags, and would be my favorite greatest-hits album of all time…if Decade didn’t exist. Decade was how I first experienced Neil Young. I remember watching a movie that had  “Mr. Soul” on the soundtrack, being knocked out by the song, and buying the three cassette comp at the local Sam Goody a few weeks later. I was immediately struck by how good the collection was, and how expertly it was designed. Young pulls tracks from all over—songs from his time in Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young as well as solo album tracks and b-sides and seven(!) previously unreleased tracks— and weaves them into the definitive release of Neil Young’s entire career. Decade is where I would send the Neil Young newbie to start, and would be surprised if it didn’t make them a lifetime fan. I may be far from the biggest apologist for the greatest-hits album, but this is the gold standard, and the reason compilations of this sort still matter.

1.  Even better is Love Songs, which I still have a cassette copy of. But even that is missing “Touch Me When Were Dancing,” the best of Karen’s later vocal performances, and an ace cover of Klaatu’s “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft.” ↩︎
2. I admit: I’m curious to check out the Rick Rubin produced 12 Songs when I have time. I love what Rubin did for the tail end of Johnny Cash’s career, and would like to see if he had similar results with Neil. ↩︎
3.  The same can’t be said of the companion collection by Joy Division (also called Substance) —which is also excellent, and does a nice job of gathering all the great non-album singles Joy Division recorded—because there are only two studio albums you have to buy, and they are both essential. You can buy two albums, can’t you? If you have to choose, I prefer Closer over Unknown Pleasures, probably because it’s sadder and lonelier than its predecessor, and on a couple songs (“Isolation,” “Decades”) points the direction the band would take as New Order after Ian Curtis’ death. ↩︎
4.  I know Petty is from Gainesville, Florida, but he has much more in common musically with John Mellencamp than he does The Allman Brothers or any other southern rockers of the era. ↩︎
5. Another compilation that partially attempts to redraw a band’s established image is the recent vinyl release Nine Sevens by Wire, which I picked up on Record Store Day. On the first disc Wire picks the catchiest songs off their first three albums and adds a couple of hummable non-album tracks; if this was the only thing you ever heard by the band, you’d never buy they were sometimes considered experimental or challenging. Disc two, on the other hand, has enough weird sounds and amorphous song structures to make you think you are listening to an entirely different band. ↩︎