Also, a major note up front... These CDs are not available for distribution (and certainly not for sale), this is just to document some stuff I've done for my own enjoyment and/or amusement.
First some themed collections, various artists:
* September 11, 2001: A Memorial Tribute (99k)---I made this a month or two after. All songs were written and recorded well before 9/11/01 and thus have absolutely nothing to do with that day, but I felt they somehow resonated with events when re-examined through the prism of that day.
* God & Country (84k)---There's a significant portion of country music dealing with Christian themes. These are some such tunes from my CD collection. (A 2-disc set.)
* Just Foolin' Around (71k)---There are also a lot of country tunes that are just plain fun(ny). Many of these would probably be considered "novelty tunes" if a mainstream artist did them, but country artists seem more willing (in general) to drop their seriousness once in a while and just play for laughs. (A 2-disc set.)
* Songs For The Working Man (60k)---Another great theme of country music.
* Hot Tracks: Train Super Hits (57k)---The front cover for this one was from an actual available 10-track collection of train songs. I only liked about half the songs on it and felt that some of them didn't even have that much really to do with trains. I knew I had a bunch more good ones spread out across my CDs at home. So I digitally erased some text on the front which listed artists on the CD and made my own back insert with all the artists/songs I wanted. For some reason the background color on the back portion looks like an ugly dark green on my monitor, but it prints as a brown very similar in tone to the front image so I just left it that way. This is the only time I can recall having that problem. (A 2-disc set.)
* Some Of Rich's Favorite Songs (48k)---This is my most recent collection and it isn't so much a themed set as a non-themed one. I kept the cover design extremely simple, so it's basically just a track list. These are quite simply just some all-time favorite songs of mine from artists who aren't typically among my all-time favorites or even necessarily standout artists in any particular way (though some are). There are some real downers here, particularly around the middle where there are a few tunes in what I affectionately call my "suicide suite." But after that there are some real uppers too, so it all balances out. The CD starts with pop/rock and drifts over to a country finish.
I've gotten some Greatest Hits CDs (or such collections) of artists thinking that I'd probably like even the stuff I wasn't already familiar with, but then that turned out to not be the case such that I might only like about half the songs. I found I wouldn't listen to the CDs too often in that case, so I decided to try to combine some artists' hits into "combo collections." Where possible I tried to match up similar artists or artists of one particular era. I couldn't always do that, but the following are the results...
Some "Best of" compilations:
* Gordon Lightfoot & America (51k)
* The Monkees & ABBA (51k)
* The Doors & The Guess Who (51k)
* Tom Jones & Engelbert Humperdinck (55k)
* Hall & Oates, Todd Rundgren, & Boz Scaggs (52k)---Early Hall & Oates stuff. Only three songs from Todd, but they were the three "biggies" that I simply had to have. He also produced some of the Hall & Oates stuff, though, so he's still well represented. "Sara Smile" is actually off of their much more well known Greatest Hits: Rock'n Soul, Part 1, but I've always thought the tune sounded more like their early work.
* Dusty Springfield, Carole King, & Vonda Shepard (51k)---The Vonda Shepard stuff is off of the first Ally McBeal soundtrack collection which is all Shepard, but she does a lot of covers of older tunes. This set begins with Dusty's classic "I Only Want To Be With You" and finishes with Shepard's slow tempo version giving the CD a nice "cyclical" feel. And obviously they're all female artists too.
* Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes, The Alan Parsons Project, & Fleetwood Mac (51k)---There are probably a few other APP tunes I wouldn't mind having, but the songs here are from the only collection of their hits I ever got. The Fleetwood Mac tunes are the ones I like from their Greatest Hits collection that aren't also on their classic Rumours album, which is like a greatest hits package unto itself. The running time for this CD was a little bit long and wouldn't fit originally, so I edited Fleetwood Mac's "Hold Me" to eliminate a long repetitive outro which I didn't care for too much. This way I get the bulk of the song which I like.
* Louis Armstrong, Bobby Darin, Nilsson, & Tony Orlando and Dawn (57k)---This is the most eclectic artist combo package I've done just because these were kind of "leftovers" that didn't fit elsewhere so they got thrown together. I remember Armstrong's "Moon River" was used in a favorite early episode of Northern Exposure. The Bobby Darin CD was not what I expected in that it had him talking and discussing some of his hits--which is fine except that the discussion often overlapped the beginning of the songs. I had to do some precise editing to get down to the "meat" of the tunes without the dialogue. I recall that "Beyond the Sea" was particularly tough, but it turned out satisfactorily. The result is that these aren't quite the full definitive versions of his songs, but they'll do. Nilsson's "Everybody's Talkin'" and "I Guess The Lord Must Be In New York City" are two of my all-time favorite songs ever and I often end up just looping those two over and over.
* Marty Robbins, Roger Miller, Charlie Rich, & the Bellamy Brothers (106k)---Added Marty Robbins up front in August, 2007. The first draft of this compilation was originally just the last three artists, but Marty maxes out the disc to capacity. Roger Miller tended to get a bit too silly even for my tastes, so I have four of his more serious tunes on here. (I also like having Marty and Roger back to back for the reverse initials coincidence of MR/RM.) Charlie Rich, aka "The Silver Fox," did a few of my favorites back in his day. The Bellamy Brothers aren't as well known as the others here, but I like a good chunk of their early stuff.
A couple CDs of songs by some artists I particularly like such that I've picked up miscellaneous collections, greatest hits or otherwise, just for the sake of having one or two tunes unavailable elsewhere. I call these collections Side Tracks and use a standard generic front cover image of a train in a railroad yard...
* Side Tracks: George Strait, Mark Chesnutt, & Dwight Yoakam (51k)---George Strait doesn't write (or even co-write) his own tunes, but he did so with some of the early demo tunes included here. Not to denigrate Strait's writing abilities, but to be honest I think he's better off not writing his own songs. I'm not saying they're horrible or anything and they're certainly better than I could ever hope to do, but they're just not up to the standards of his later hit-making days (IMO of course) where he relies on proven Nashville songwriters (such as Dean Dillon). Still, they're interesting to have. There are some later Strait tunes too, including a "Fly Me To The Moon" duet with Frank Sinatra (posthumously) and "Murder On Music Row" with Alan Jackson.
* Side Tracks 2: Joe Diffie, The Kentucky HeadHunters, Collin Raye, Aaron Tippin, & Trisha Yearwood (42k)
Some custom hits collections and specialized versions of certain CDs by particular artists:
* Simply Red's The Best Of Simply Red, 1995-1999 (57k)---After their first four CDs Simply Red started to become more hit or miss with me. So I collected the songs I like best from their next three CDs.
* Harry Chapin's Anthology (101k)---This was only ever released on cassette, but that was the only Chapin I had on Cassette and I liked it a lot. I later purchased the box set of Harry Chapin, but I still liked the idea of having this smaller collection for a quick Chapin fix. Before I actually got the box set, a friend of mine converted my cassette tape to digital .wav formats and burned a CD, though there was some slight crackle because of a tape flaw on one side. Once I got the box set I was able to get most of these songs directly from there with the exception of the studio version of "30,000 Pounds Of Bananas" (the box set has the live version which I personally don't like as much, so I had to pick up Verities & Balderdash just for the one tune) and "Song Man" which I ended up having to use the home-converted version, but it sounds fine. This cover is basically a scan of the cassette sleeve unfolded.
* Culture Club's Kissing To Be Clever (58k)---I had this on cassette and it was a 12-song album. When I converted over to CDs, I could only find a 9-song version. "Time (Clock Of The Heart)," "Romance Beyond The Alphabet," [the instrumental version of "Time (CotH)"], and "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me (dub version featuring Pappa Weasel)" were not included. I managed to obtain those songs on other Culture Club collections and then re-assembled this album as I remembered it.
* Culture Club and/or Boy George Leftovers (66k)---I had two collections, At Worst The Best Of Boy George And Culture Club and Culture Club 12" Mixes Plus, laying around both of which contain a significant number of unique rarities, plus alternate versions/mixes of known songs. I decided to merge them to make one really unique collection. I also threw on four alternate techno/dance mixes of Boy George's "Same Thing In Reverse" from a CD single. I interspersed those versions with odd short spoken bits (mostly phone messages) from George's fabulous Cheapness And Beauty album (easily his best solo effort IMO and perhaps surprisingly to many one of my absolute favorite albums of all time) which also happens to be where you can find the official album version of "Same Thing In Reverse" (where it's quite different as apparently the "Country Queen Mix"). I credit this collection as Culture Club and/or Boy George because let's face it, no one is more "and/or" than Boy George! The tunes wouldn't quite fit on one CD, so I divided it into Culture Club stuff on the first CD and George solo stuff on the second.
* Boy George & Culture Club [ All Boxed In ] (103K)---This is the Culture Club 4-disc box set now boiled down to 3 discs. (Note: There's a lot of BG solo stuff, so I have no idea why this is considered a "Culture Club" box set.) I eliminated the tracks that are just repeats of songs I have on regular albums. That still leaves an amazing (in terms of sheer number) 43 tracks of demos, unreleased songs, and remixes. The third disc is essentially the fourth disc of the original box set, minus "I Just Wanna Be Loved" which sounds identical (to me) to what can be found on CC's 1999 reunion album Don't Mind If I Do. In place of that I moved "Shirley Temple Moment" (not a song, but a recording of Boy George having a hissy fit in front of the band) from the first disc to the last track of the third (and now final) disc. So otherwise disc 3 is the same as the original disc 4, containing remixes done by Riche "Drumhead" Stevens. Disc 1 combines discs 1 & 2 of the original box set and then disc 2 is the new/unique stuff from disc 3. Not all the remixes are great, but the demos and unreleased tracks are definitely worth having and some ("Peculiar World", "Love Is Lonely", "Grand Scheme Of Things", "If I Were U", "Hiroshima", "Armageddon", "Run, Run, Run") positively shine. George's take on Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made 4 Walking" is a nice treat too.
* Foster & Lloyd's Version Of The Truth (38k)---I have absolutely no idea what was up with this album. This is another one I had on cassette and thought to be a 12-song album. Then the process of seeking out CDs revealed that by far the most commonly found CD version was a 10-song set, but I know I eventually came across three slightly different CD versions of Version Of The Truth! Being not among your more popular country artists (at least around New Jersey) and out of print made this a tough one to re-assemble, but I finally managed to do it. And I figured as long as there are so many different versions already out there, well, one more wouldn't hurt, so I created my very own further expanded version. This one includes "Lonesome Run" (from the 10-song version), "Can't Have Nothin'," "I Will Love You Anyhow," and "Take A Little Time For Love" (all three from the 12-song version), plus "White Train" (from The Essential Foster & Lloyd) and the Radney Foster solo track "Close Up The Honky Tonks" (from Red Hot + Country, A Benefit for AIDS Education & Relief).
* Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Bros.' The Best Of The Gatlins: All The Gold In California (40k)---The only Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Bros. collection I had for a long time was Biggest Hits, which contained ten tracks, but not some of their actual biggest (like "All The Gold In California," "Broken Lady," "Love Is Just A Game"). Somewhere along the line I also picked up the much more comprehensive The Best Of The Gatlins: All The Gold In California which contains eighteen tunes, including the obvious glaring omissions from Biggest Hits. There were four tunes on Biggest Hits, though, that I now knew and loved and wanted to continue to hear, so I just added them onto the end of TBotG:ATGIC. There are actually five tunes on BH that are not on TBotG:ATGIC, but the fifth was one I just didn't like at all and can easily do without (a duet with Janie Frickie).
* The Judds' Greatest Hits (89k)---This is a combo of the two 10-track volumes of Judds Greatest Hits plus the seven tracks from Love Can Build A Bridge which were not hits. I picked up LCBAB specifically for the tune "One Hundred And Two," but found I liked the other ones too so I wanted to include those as well. For the jewel case inserts I simply used the front insert from volume one (which was not labelled as such) and the back insert from volume two, from which I then removed the "volume two" designation. And obviously I had to remove the volume two track list and replace it with the full 27 song list. (A 2-disc set.)
* Keith Whitley's L.A. To Miami, St. Louis To Charlotte (56k)---I picked up the early Whitley album L.A. To Miami (produced by Blake Mevis) and then added four other Mevis-produced bonus tracks from A Tribute Album which were never released otherwise to the best of my knowledge. It always seemed a little odd anyway to have actual Whitley tunes included on a tribute album to himself (he drank himself to death in 1989). Seems like they fit better here. One of the bonus songs includes the line "Charlotte's in North Carolina and I'm in St. Louis misery" so I thought my re-titling was slightly clever (though you may disagree). I also just found The Essential Keith Whitley which, to be honest, probably isn't all that essential, really. But it contains 20 songs, the first six of which were on Whitley's very first release, a six song mini-album from RCA entitled A Hard Act To Follow (produced by Norro Wilson). I originally had it on audio cassette, but never found it on CD. So now I've added those tunes here as well. Plus there's a song called "I Wonder Where You Are Tonight" (produced by Blake Mevis) and the liner notes of TEKW claim it is from the album L.A. To Miami. However, that album was my base starting point for this particular project and the song isn't on it, nor was it on the audio cassette version I once had as far as I can remember. I figure it must have been produced during the LTM sessions (also produced by Blake Mevis), but never actually used so I now include it under the LTM section on this disc.
* Rupert Holmes' Greatest Hits+3 (40k)---This one was very easy, it's just the regular 18 song Greatest Hits package with 3 tracks added from his biggest seller Partners In Crime. Already included were "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)," "Him," and "Answering Machine," which were, of course, his big hits. But I also liked "Partners In Crime," "Nearsighted," and "In You I Trust," so I tossed them into the mix as well. (A 2-disc set.)
* Isaac Asimov's Foundation: The Psychohistorians, read by William Shatner (176k)---This was a vinyl album converted to CD. It's just one of those oddball things that I got on the spur of the moment. I've read most of Asimov's science fiction through the years and I've always been a big Star Trek fan, so this seemed like a nice thing to have. I've probably only listened to it once, but that's not the point. It is exactly what I've indicated... William Shatner reading the opening bit of Isaac Asimov's famous Foundation epic. This image is larger than others found here only because there's a lot of text on the back CD insert that I wanted to remain somewhat readable if at all possible.
* Four Tracks from Steely Dan (57k)---This was a vinyl EP record that a friend digitized into CD format for me. It includes the early Dan demos "Dallas" and "Sail The Waterway." I scanned the vinyl album cover myself, a process whereby I actually had to kind of scan the four corners of each side (eight scans in all) and then merge the images into one to end up with front and back CD inserts. (My scanner, like most, is not big enough to do a full album cover scan in one shot.)
* Steely Dan's Zombie Tunes (133K)---My own custom version of Catalyst (1968-1971), the most complete collection of early Dan demos ever released. I explain more about the history of this one in this blog entry. For this page I'll just mention that I've added extra stuff to expand the set to 26 songs on the first CD, 18 on the second. The two tunes mentioned immediately above for the Four Tracks CD are included as are five of the eight tracks from the 1970 soundtrack You Gotta Walk It Like You Talk It. I also included seven tracks from Thomas Jefferson Kaye's 1973 self-titled album and 1974's First Grade which involve Walter Becker and/or Donald Fagen, including "American Lovers" and "Jones" which were written by Becker & Fagen. And the very first tune is a stripped-down version of "Stone Piano," despite the fact that a more musically developed version is included among the Catalyst tunes. I titled this collection Zombie Tunes just because I like the sound of it. Becker and Fagen eventually used the word "zombie" in a few later SD tunes, but it doesn't actually appear in any of the songs on this custom collection. And finally, here's a Word doc (145K) listing lyrics and musical credits for all tracks as best I can determine. I'm sure there are mistakes, but that's sort of inevitable with a project like this given the murky audio quality and the "pre-history" time frame involved.
* Steely Dan's Katy Lied (alt takes, mixes & 2 outtakes) (73k)---I finally put my "praying mantis tearing the head off a beetle" pic to good use---as the back image of the CD insert for this compilation of Katy Lied alternate takes and mixes, plus two outtakes.
* Walter Becker's 11 Tracks Of Whack (Outtakes, Demos & Extras) (109k)---Outtakes and demos from 11 Tracks of Whack plus some live performances featuring Becker's lead vocals. Quality of the live recordings varies, but I did my best to fix a few glitches here and there and even out the volume levels.
* Donald Fagen Archive (137k)---This collects some miscellaneous Donald Fagen/Steely Dan tracks, some off of the Steely Dan collection Gold (Expanded Edition) and some downloaded mp3s I converted to .wav files. Included also are a demo version of "Black Cow" and an early alternate version of "I Got The News," both tunes from Steely Dan's best known album Aja. A few tracks are poor sound quality, but I've never found anything better. I just wanted to have the best of Fagen's lesser known miscellaneous tunes collected in one spot for the convenience of playing wherever instead of just being limited to playing them on my PC.
* Donald Fagen's Morph The Cat World Premiere (53k)---This was a streamed web broadcast of Fagen debuting his most recent album, Morph The Cat, on 94.7 FM, KTWV ("The Wave") in Los Angeles on February 26, 2006. Fagen DJ'd for an hour or so and explained a little here and there about the songs. The broadcast was actually interrupted for about a minute in the middle of "What I Do." At first I thought the glitch was only on my PC due to my typically poor dialup connection, but it turned out to be for everyone listening on the web. Well, the song had been available via a lesser quality stream on Fagen's own website for a couple weeks and I confess I had already recorded it to my hard drive while playing it from there. (Only for my own convenience of course--I never distributed it.) So here's the tricky bit... Through careful editing I managed to patch the KTWV broadcast with the missing minute or so of "What I Do" by taking it from the file I already had on hand. I can't say the patch isn't extremely obvious, but you work with what tools you have on hand and it's much better than a minute of silence in the middle (even if that minute of silence was in honor of Ray Charles).
* Donald Fagen at The Tower Theatre on March 4, 2006 (82k)---A 2-disc "naughty" set from his performance In Upper Darby, PA (close enough to call it Philly) on the Morph The Cat Tour.
* Steely Dan's The Definitive Collection, disc 1 (82k)
* Steely Dan's The Definitive Collection, disc 2 (64k)
* Steely Dan's The Definitive Collection, disc 3 (77k)---There actually is a recent official release of a Steely Dan Definitive Collection. But it's a single CD set and when I saw the track list I thought, "This can't be the definitive collection of Steely Dan---where's...?" Granted, I'm such a big Dan fan that for me the definitive collection is everything they've ever put out, but still... So I made my own definitive collection. I really wanted to keep it to a two disc set, but I couldn't quite do it as there were no songs I really felt could be eliminated to make it fit on only two discs. So I ended up adding a few and making it a three disc set. Other Dan fans will no doubt disagree with some of my selections (or omissions), but I was trying to concentrate on radio hits first and other personal standout tunes second in an effort to showcase (for those not already familiar with the Dan) their full range and versatility as they've reeled through the years.
* Steely Dan's The Definitive Collection (47k)---A 2-disc set. When I made the 3-disc set above I was slightly misunderstanding the limits of how much I could put on one CD. Even though the CDs are listed as being able to hold 700 MB, they are also listed as holding up to 80 minutes of music. Turns out the 80-minute limit is the more strict one and you can actually go over the 700 MB threshold. With this in mind, I was able to pare down (and even slightly alter) the previously padded definitive collection to fit it on one 2-disc set like I originally wanted to do. Of course, there are still some decisions of inclusion/exclusion which are nearly impossible to make, but I did my best. I wanted to be sure too that the Dan's last two albums were as well represented (and therefore showcased) as their older, much more well known material.
* Steely Dan Live, Reelin' Through The Years (53k)---Miscellaneous live tracks I've accumulated in the last few years. Not a single entire live show, but selected tracks with a few rarities such as (3 tracks never recorded in studio) "This All Too Mobile Home", "Wet Side Story" and "Cash Only Island" (though very poor quality), plus rarely performed "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" (not done since 1974), "Any Major Dude Will Tell You", "Almost Gothic" (done only once or twice, I believe) and "West Of Hollywood".
