This disc is a great collection for those people who only want Grant’s biggest, or most noteworthy, hits and who don’t have her two previous hits collections, The Collection, (1986) which marked the early half of her career, and Greatest Hits: 1986-2004, which nicely rounded up the second half.
With the exception of the Heart in Motion (1991), which was Grant’s monster success and is represented here by an overload of five tracks — “Baby Baby,” “Every Heartbeat,” “That’s What Love Is For,” “Good For Me,” and “I Will Remember You” — her other, arguably better, discs get a paltry one or two tracks each, with her critical watershed album, Lead Me On (1988), only snagging the title track and “Saved By Love.” Even House of Love (1994) is represented by a measly two tracks, the Vince Gill/Grant title track duet that sparked all the rumors and the anemic, embarrassing “Lucky One.”
Several key Grant songs are missing “Where Do You Hide Your Heart,” “Everywhere I Go,” “Say Once More,” “The Next Time I Fall” with Peter Cetera, and her remake of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” but this is clearly not meant to be exhaustive. After all, how could a 30-year career like hers be boiled down into one disc of 19 songs?
A couple related, though small, complaints: There are no new songs on this disc and one of the songs that was included is “Stay For A While,” one of the two “new” songs that was included on The Collection. That doesn’t seem fair. Compilers should have left that off and given us one of the other missing hits noted above — or better yet, a new song to give existing fans a reason to buy this disc. And, how can they justify including only “Find A Way” from Grant’s breakthrough crossover success, Unguarded, that meant so much to her career and to the genre of contemporary Christian music?
If you’re a longtime fan of Grant’s, you don’t need this. There is nothing here you don’t already have. But if you’re looking for a one-disc collection, with only a few noticeable faults, this may do it for you.
