Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Sure As I'm Sittin' Here
2. Hangin' Around The Observatory
3. Down Home
4. Washable Ink
5. Slug Line
6. Radio Girl
7. Pink Bedroom
8. It Hasn't Happened Yet
9. Spy Boy
10. Doll Hospital
11. My Edge Of The Razor
12. Riding With The King
13. She Loves The Jerk
14. I Don't Even Try
15. The Love That Harms
16. The Way We Make A Broken Heart
17. When We Ran
18. The Usual
19. She Said The Same
20. Lipstick Sunset
21. Thank You Girl
22. Have A Little Faith In Me

Disc 2:

1. Memphis In The Meantime
2. Thing Called Love
3. Tennessee Plates
4. Slow Turning
5. Drive South
6. Feels Like Rain
7. Paper Thin
8. Child Of The Wild Blue Yonder
9. Real Fine Love
10. Perfectly Good Guitar
11. Buffalo River Home
12. Angel Eyes
13. Cry Love
14. Shredding The Document
15. Don't Think About Her When You Are Trying To Drive - Little Village
16. Pirate Radio
17. Crossing Muddy Waters
18. Take It Down

Product Details

• Released on: 2001-08-07
• Number of discs: 2
• Formats: Import, Best of
• Dimensions: .26 pounds

From Amazon.com
To paraphrase a musical icon, John Hiatt has been a poet, a pauper, and a pawn. He also wrote "Riding with the King." What he hasn't been is a household name. That's a shame, because Hiatt has forged one of the most consistently satisfying canons of any contemporary American singer-songwriter. This double-disc, 40-song anthology charts Hiatt's sometimes stormy, always compelling course across more than a half-dozen record labels and nearly as many styles. Beginning with his early days as a Nashville hired gun (including "Sure As I'm Sittin' Here," a song Three Dog Night took to the top 20), this collection's first disc documents Hiatt's restless early career, which bounded off early Dylan (who covered the songwriter's "The Usual") and Stones influences, through nascent L.A. punk, and on to healthy Elvis obsessions (both Presley and Costello); indeed, songs like "My Edge of the Razor" and "She Loves the Jerk" sound like Costello outtakes. The second chapter chronicles Hiatt boiling off his rich, disparate influences in the mid-'80s to find his own true voice--and again forging successes for others with songs, like his sly original version of Bonnie Raitt's comeback hit, "Thing Called Love." By the collection's final tracks ("Take It Down" and "Crossing Muddy Waters," from the 2000 album named after the latter), Hiatt had come full circle, again embracing his country-blues roots, but in a stripped-down acoustic setting that only underscored his gifts of observation and musical storytelling. --Jerry McCulley