Best & Worst. Bizarre!!
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By sundancemountain
Who in the world picked these songs, as this collection includes the best and WORST recordings of Diamond’s illustrious career!?! If you like polka music, you’ll love “Moonlight Rider” and other never-before released tunes that (except for “Sunflower”) greatly diminish what should be the best of Diamond’s work over 50 years.
Diamond stands apart from his peers on not having many “clunkers” on his albums. Amazingly, however, they’ve found their way on to this collection with songs like “Save Me A Saturday Night” (how Neil’s producers could not hear this as an uptempo song is beyond me),” “Seongah And Jimmy” (sounds like a beginning songwriter), “The Way,” “Another Day (That Time Forgot),” “Forgotten,” “One Good Love,” and others. Really?!?! You include these and not classic B sides like “Home Is A Wounded Heart,” “Hey Louise,” “Lady Magdelane,” “Yes I Will,” “Summerlove,” “Two-Bit Manchild,” “Shelter Of Your Arms,” “Tennessee Moon,” “Can Anybody Here Me,” “Elijah’s Song,” “Alone At The Ball,” “First Time,” “(OOO) Do I Wanna Be Yours,” et al?
Also missing are brilliant songs that were so good they were released as singles, yet are absent here!? Songs like “Primitive,” “Turn Around,” “Sleep With Me Tonight,” “This Time” and “The Best Years Of Our Lives,” “Front Page Story,” “Mountains Of Love,” and others. This may be the first collection that features B side clunkers over radio play singles! Just...wow.
And fans prefer the live “Hot August Night” versions of early hits like “Solitary Man” over the original mono versions when Diamond’s voice wasn’t nearly as good. I thought the benefit of having Neil’s work all under one label was that you could choose the best versions of each song?
I would have loved the live “Jonathan” medley from the early 1980’s, or the long version of “Be” (but with a slow fade on the long instrumental at the end).
Neil Diamond is one of the greatest singer-songwriter of all time; with a body of such phenomenal work that it would take another 50 songs to really include his best work; so while there are a lot of great songs in this collection, including a dozen or so clunkers is both disappointing and confounding.
