Dwight Yoakam - The Very Best of Dwight Yoakam

Pros

• "Back of Your Hand"
• "I Want You To Want Me"
• "The Late Great Golden State"

Cons

• Missing some essential "best of" tracks.

Description

• Twenty solid tracks, spanning Yoakam's career from 1986 to 2003.
• One of the first in Rhino's new "The Very Best Of" series.
• Contains most of the old standards and a few newer tracks.

Guide Review - Dwight Yoakam - The Very Best of Dwight Yoakam

When it comes to Dwight Yoakam, it seems many people think his career can be boiled down to only his early releases. As such, much of his career is often overlooked. The same is true with this newest collection of songs. As with the first two "Best of" collections, it contains a lot of songs from his first two albums, a good set of songs from his masterpiece, "This Time," but only a few tracks from his discs of the last four years. Missing completely is the always overlooked and artistically fantastic "Gone," as well as the miraculous music from his "South of Heaven" soundtrack.

But what is represented certainly does qualify as at least SOME of the "very best of" Yoakam. It would be nice, however, to hear more culled from Yoakam's later career, as his first two collections more comprehensively covered his early work; his discs of the last few years rated only one or two songs each here. The compilers also mixed up the order of "Long Way Home" (1998) and "Tomorrow's Sounds Today" (2000), putting "Things Change" after "I Want You To Want Me." The first 15 tracks are from the first decade of Yoakam's career, while the entire second decade of exceptional music is represented by only 5 cuts, two of which are covers.

Still, it's Yoakam, so it's good. Hopefully, it would get a new listener to go out and find more and if you are a new listener checking him out for the first time, I do encourage you to find more. This disc has just enough to let you know what you're missing.