Perhaps it was inevitable that
Billy Joel
's
Greatest Hits, Vol. 3
would pale next to its double-disc predecessor.
Greatest Hits, Vols. 1 & 2
covered nine albums (it ignored
Cold Spring Harbor
), a period during which
Joel
had 26 Top 100 hits. If it had picked up where the first collection left off,
Vol. 3
would have covered three studio albums, which produced 11 hits. That alone would have made a respectable hits collection, and it would have made sense, since
The Bridge
marked the beginning of a new phase of
's career. Instead, the 17-song
begins with a pair of songs from
An Innocent Man
(
"Keeping the Faith,"
"An Innocent Man"
) that sound entirely different from the material that follows, which finds
delving into mechanized, slickly produced
adult contemporary pop
. The remaining songs don't strictly adhere to his charting hits, substituting such album tracks as
"Leningrad,"
"Shameless"
and
"Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)"
for hits like
"Modern Woman,"
"That's Not Her Style"
and his non-LP cover of
Elvis
'
"All Shook Up."
Even with those missing hits,
does summarize
's latter career quite well, culling most of his best songs from the time. However, the album ends on a down note, as it adds three new songs, all covers, that are limply produced and colorlessly played.
Bob Dylan
"To Make You Feel My Love"
-- which
decided to perform as if it was a slow, sanitized
Blonde on Blonde
outtake -- is the best of the trio, but none of them qualify as
classics, and they are an inauspicious way to end this chapter of his career. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine