Search - Glenn Frey :: Solo Collection

Not complete, but the best currently available

J. Bergstrom | Honolulu, HI United States | 08/07/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This is a decent collection for fans looking to acquire Glenn's biggest hits. Songs like "The Heat Is On," "You Belong to the City," "Smuggler's Blues," "The One You Love" and "True Love" - all classic '80s tunes that you've probably heard countless times before - are all present and accounted for. The Top 20 hit "Sexy Girl" is also here. Plus "Solo Collection" has the fantastic album track "I've Got Mine," a moody, synth-laden gem which as another reviewer noted, sounds like it could have been Part 2 of "You Belong to the City." Unfortunately, the good news ends there. Amongst the glaring omissions are the Top 40 hits "I Found Somebody" and "All Those Lies" from the "No Fun Aloud" album, AOR staples from back in the day "Partytown," "Don't Give Up," and "The Allnighter," and fan-favorites "Somebody Else," "Lovers Moon," "Some Kind of Blue" and "Love in the 21st Century." All of those should rightfully be here. Add to that that the collection is not sequenced in chronological order and falls well shy of the 80 min. mark and you can imagine what could have been had the compilers put a little more effort into this project. As for the 4 previously unreleased tracks...while it's certainly nice to have those available on CD someplace, they're mediocre at best and have no business taking the place of any of the aforementioned missing tracks. The best bet if you really want a truly definitive collection of Glenn's music is to buy all the original albums or burn your own Greatest Hits. Still, if all you can really handle is a single disc, and you're looking for the best bang for the buck, "Solo Collection" is a much better choice than the paltry "20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection" or the "Classic Glenn Frey" or "Superstar Collection: The Best of Glenn Frey" imports (which are the same album, by the way, just repackaged) which blow it by not including ANY tracks from Glenn's debut album, "No Fun Aloud" (even the version of "The One You Love" used is not the original studio version, but rather a live cut culled from the 1993 album "Glenn Frey Live"). So "Solo Collection" is still the best of what's out there, but hopefully Universal will do us all a favor and correct that in the future."