This Week’s Top 10: Best New Songs on Greatest Hits Albums
Streaming music is broadly bad. The sound quality is bad, the pay structure is bad, the belief that you have access to all of recorded music when in reality you have been cut off by huge swaths of even very recent music history is bad. It has also killed off a bunch of formats I used to swear by, including the movie tie-in soundtrack album and the greatest hits record.
Nobody really bothers with greatest hits compilations, not when you can just drag all of your favorite artists’ biggest songs into a playlist and call it a day. Greatest hits records were not infallible, and in fact they were built on the hope that people who loved certain acts would buy music they already owned. Because of that, most acts would toss in one or two new songs on the compilation to make it more appealing and to give them an excuse to promote a single associated with a collection of stuff already out there. Sometimes those songs were leftovers, but sometimes they became as beloved as the songs they stood next to on those comps.
So here is the definitive list of the 10 greatest tunes that began life as a toss-in on a hits disc.
10. U2, “Sweetest Thing”
The story is that Bono tossed this off at the last minute as a gift to his wife when he forgot her birthday. (As an aside: Bono and his wife Ali have been married for over 40 years and they’ve been together over 50. Can you imagine how difficult it must have been live with Bono during some of those stretches? She’s not like us, she’s a hero.) This one is a bit of a cheat because it originally showed up as a b-side to the “Where the Streets Have No Name” single in 1987, but that original mix is pretty bad and nobody cared about it. The remix they put together for The Best of 1980-1990 has a nice little bounce to it and playful in a way that most U2 songs aren’t (at least in that era). It got a cool video, too. It’s not an all-time classic, though it weirdly made a comeback on live setlists in the past decade and even made some appearances during U2’s run at The Sphere.
9. Bruce Springsteen, “Secret Garden”
The Greatest Hits that the Boss dropped in 1995 is a weird one, because it tried to coherently bring together the various phases of Springsteen’s career on a single set. He’s been around long enough and had enough hits that his whole career kind of evens out in the long view, but it was weird putting stuff like “Thunder Road” and “Badlands” next to the late ‘80s stuff like “Human Touch.” The big draw of this compilation was the first new recordings Bruce did with the E Street band in like 10 years, and while those songs are good (though the best one, “Murder Incorporated,” was actually recorded in 1982 and then stuck in a drawer), the easy highlight for me was “Secret Garden,” a really lovely little synth soul ballad that feels of a piece with “Streets of Philadelphia.” (Springsteen’s upcoming Tracks II box set has a whole album’s worth of stuff recorded during the “Streets of Philadelphia” sessions, and that’s the stuff I’m most excited about.) This was quietly ignored when it came out but became a backdoor hit when it showed up on the soundtrack to Jerry Maguire a year later. It peaked at number 19 on the Hot 100, marking Bruce’s final appearance in the Top 40.
8. Madonna, “Justify My Love”
This was the new one from Madonna’s 1993 compilation The Immaculate Collection, and our girl was on such a heater that this went to number one (her ninth of a dozen Hot 100 chart-toppers). It has to be one of the strangest number ones in history, as it’s largely a series of electronic experiments that largely vacillate between house and trip-hop, and Madonna doesn’t so much sing as she does whisper expressively. It’s also Prince-level horny. I love it so much. Also this is co-written by Lenny Kravitz, who somehow is on this list twice.
7. No Doubt, “It’s My Life”
I really shouldn’t even include this because it’s a cover of the definitive Talk Talk single, but I think this is the context in which Gwen Stefani sounds best and I like their very straightforward take on the song. I'm probably overrating the one new contribution to The Singles 1992-2003 because I hated so much of what No Doubt had been doing in the years leading up to that point, particularly the Rock Steady album. My favorite No Doubt songs are the ones that feel like ‘80s New Wave covers anyway (particularly “New”) so this is the wheelhouse I wish they had stayed in.
6. Lenny Kravitz, “Again”
Here’s Lenny again! I’ve always had a soft spot for Mr. Kravitz even though I think a lot of the stuff he was reviving at his peak was junk. (Also I think “American Woman” is among the worst songs ever recorded, so the fact that he got a hit out of it made me unreasonably mad.) For my money, I always preferred Lenny the Balladeer to Lenny the Rocker, which is why I’ll go all in on “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over” and “Can’t Get You Off My Mind” and this bonus tune from his 2000 Greatest Hits record. Like No Doubt, Kravitz had committed some recent musical crimes in the walk-up to this release, so I was pleased to have the Lenny I liked back again. Also, the guitar solo rips!
5. 2Pac, “Changes”
Released almost two years to the day after his murder, Tupac’s Greatest Hits is an incredibly well-built look at his too-short career that does a nice job of telling the story of his talent with a healthy mix of chart hits and not-quite-deep cuts. “Changes” was one of four previously unreleased songs on the set, and it was originally recorded in 1992 and then remixed posthumously for this release (though supposedly the sample of Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is” was already in place on the original). In typical Tupac fashion, it sounds like a breezy bounce thanks to the sample and the sweetly-sung chorus by the short-lived R&B trio Talent, but if you look at the lyrics it’s a harrowing account of life on the streets. Tupac was always a man of two worlds, and “Changes” expresses that duality as well as anything in our dude’s whole discography.
4. Psychedelic Furs, “All That Money Wants”
I remember Psychedelic Furs’ All of This And Nothing, their singles compilation from 1988, was always one of those eight-dollar bargain bin titles at the big box stores, and because of that I always assumed it was low-budget trash. When I finally got around to listening to Psychedelic Furs (after ironically falling in love with Love Spit Love, the band Richard Butler started after the Furs disintegrated), I had my ears blown back. It’s one of those compilations that had me walking away thinking, “Oh, so every song this band ever made was great?” That’s not the case at all (their best album, 1984’s Mirror Moves, is still half junk), but it was wild how much the newly-recorded “All That Money Wants” fit in with the aesthetic established by proven hits like “Pretty In Pink” and “Heartbreak Beat.”
3. R.E.M., “Bad Day”
This was another one that had been kicking around the R.E.M. discography for a long time before it was released as the new single for 2003’s In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003 (which only covered their Warner Bros. releases). It was originally recorded during the sessions for Life’s Rich Pageant in 1986 but was apparently demoed even earlier than that. (You can hear that 1986 version on the 2006 compilation And I Feel Fine: The Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982-1987.) When it finally dropped in 2003, a lot of people dismissed it as something of a tired sequel to “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” even though “Bad Day” pre-dates it. I like Michael Stipe in high-energy motormouth mode, and the band had not really done this kind of thing in a long time, particularly in the post-Bill Berry era. This arrived in 2003, years before everyone carried around cameras on their person at all times almost by accident, but the chorus, “It’s been a bad day/ Please don’t take a picture” seems to have predicted the future in a way that feels particular to Stipe’s brand of genius.
2. Janet Jackson, “Runaway”
Janet Jackson’s Design of a Decade: 1986-1996 is one of the best pound-for-pound greatest hits packages ever dropped. Is there a track on it that isn’t a generation-defining anthem? (The fact that it pulls seven whole songs from Rhythm Nation is a bit of a cheat code.) But Janet was also still on the high from her 1993 album janet., which found her evolving into a proper grown-up R&B star, and “Runaway” is a glorious extension of that evolution. Originally crafted as a potential duet with her brother Michael (their only direct collaboration, “Scream,” came out the same year), it’s a Prince-esque funk jam with a good dose of weirdo funk and a generous helping of pop sweetness. It’s genuinely shocking to me that this didn’t make it to the top of the Hot 100 (it peaked at three) because I remember being unable to escape this song for love nor money during the fall of ’95 (the video, which rules, was in constant rotation on MTV). But then I also remembered that was the Fall of Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” and it all makes sense.
1. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”
Another incredible pound-for-pound championship contender, Petty’s 1993 Greatest Hits truly is nothing but bangers, from “American Girl” all the way through “Into the Great Wide Open.” “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” ended up becoming one of Petty’s highest charting singles thanks to the fact that it rules ass but also thanks to the creepy-cool video starring Kim Basinger. The song was recorded during a time of strife for the Heartbreakers, who were still a little miffed that Petty had recorded the solo album Full Moon Fever without them, and Petty was in the midst of recording another solo album that ended up being Wildflowers (though most all of the Heartbreakers play on that album). Tensions were particularly high between Petty and drummer Stan Lynch, and this ended up being one of the last Petty songs Stan played on. He went out with a bang, as this is a sinewy Southern blues that boogies and rattles and cooks like few other rock songs ever have.