Melissa Manchester Greatest Hits Album - Best Songs Collection for Relaxing, Work & Road Trips | Perfect for Music Lovers & 70s/80s Fans

Melissa Manchester is a fantastic artist whose catalogue has largely been ignored for the past couple of decades. "Hits" collections seem to be about the best we can expect from the big record companies, and most of the collections are pretty generic.With PLAYLIST, we have a collection that ends up being different from previous compilations. Not labeled "Greatest Hits," it is indeed missing some of Ms. Manchester's bigger chart successes ("Just You and I" and "Fire In the Morning" being two that come to mind). What this compilation presents is a fairly wide-spanning career overview, nicely covering her earlier career on Arista while also including a number of post-Arista releases.Of particular interest to Melissa Manchester fans will be the "rarities" included here, one of which is previously unreleased in any form. "A Mother and Father's Prayer" is a song that originally appeared on a Collin Raye album in 2000 (and this is the duet version, not the more obscure solo studio or live versions). From the recent (2010) movie soundtrack to DIRTY GIRL is the song "Rainbird," a stunning new song co-written with actress Mary Steenburgen (who appears in the movie). Closing out the album is a new live recording, recorded in 2011, of a song titled "I Know Who I Am."The sound quality of all tracks is excellent here; the earlier material sound like the remasters done in the '90s for the Japanese CD releases (as opposed to the awful-sounding Wounded Bird releases a decade later).The only real negative comment I have as about the downloadability of the tracks -- the only previously unreleased track can only be downloaded if you purchase the entire album. You can't buy the live track by itself. This is obviously Song Music's (out-of-touch) way of bleeding more money out of Ms. Manchester's fans. For those of us, like me, who prefer the uncompressed audio of CD, this isn't a big problem, as I'd always rather buy the CD than download the MP3s, but for many, this will mean making a choice between paying $8 for songs they already have, or not buying the album at all.If you're new to Melissa Manchester, you might want to start with the original GREATEST HITS album, or, better, with THE ESSENCE OF MELISSA MANCHESTER. But for fans, this is a great compilation that will not disappoint.