Many artists end up having various career spanning compilation albums. For the purposes of this Thread I’m only looking at cases when a Greatest Hits or Best Of compilation is followed up with a second volume. ie Not a new hits compilation meant to replace or improve upon a previous compilation that was deemed rushed to market or an inadequate representation of the artist’s output. Best of Vol. 2 or Greatest Hits Vol. 2 when specifically issued as a follow up to the previous compilation with no overlap of the songs featured.
Which Best of Vol. 2 or Greatest Hits Vol. 2 shows the greatest discrepancy in quality from Vol. 1?
John Oliver made a joke a week or two ago, “if you do essentially the same terrible thing more than 30 times in a row, you’re not a management company. You’re basically Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits Volumes 2 and 3” implying that Volume 1 was all that was necessary. It’s a funny and well structured joke but it’s poorly researched since Billy Joel’s “Greatest Hits Volumes 1 and 2” was a double album issued at once rather than Volume 2 being a follow up to Volume 1 (although, I would agree that Volume 3 was useless).
I like Queen’s Greatest Hits much better than Greatest Hits II, but there’s still a lot of good stuff on II (it is still Queen, afterall).
Nope, my nomination for this Thread is Journey.
Journey’s Greatest Hits 2 doesn’t have a single good song on it. You may disagree but you’d be wrong. The best songs on that release could be charitably be described as “meh”.
By contrast, Journey’s Greatest Hits, the original compilation, has got gems from start to finish. The lesser songs are perfectly good filler to take you along for the ride and the better songs are icon rock anthems.
Anyone got a better example (or worse example, perhaps I should say) than Journey?
I have a sort-of-example: Our Lady Peace’s one-volume best of. The first four songs are from their early career: Naveed, Starseed, Superman’s Dead, and Clumsy. It’s the best four-track opener to an album since the 70s. The rest of the album is forgettably mediocre or just plain bad.
Wrong. Those are all good, solid songs that were popular on the radio* (AM band, remember that?). Now GH, vol 3, was lame, mostly because he didn’t have many radio hits after GH2 as RCA was in the process of forcing him out the door, previous sales be damned.
*“Welcome to my Morning” was not on the radio IIRC, but was a big concert fave.
CCR’s " Chronicle Vol I" had most of their hits and a couple of “filler” songs. “Chronicle Vol II” had a couple of hits (Midnight Special and Born On The Bayou) and was otherwise mostly filler.
To be fair to the band Journey, they had a lot of hits, but never had a number one hit. Having a Number one hit would help your greatest hits album. Not having one, meh?