This excellent overview of
Vega's career contains all the hits and a fair sampling from each of her five albums, though
Days of Open Hand receives a cold shoulder (only "Book of Dreams" represents it here), being a critical and personal failure. The CD as a whole shows that while
Vega has stayed fairly consistent as a songwriter, her growth has been marked in the collaborations with various producers, from the spare, simplistic sound stages of
Steve Addabbo and
Lenny Kaye to the lush metallurgy of
Mitchell Froom and
Tchad Blake. The collection also features that bane of fans, the exclusive track, necessitating purchasing the CD when one owns all the other material. However, these two new songs -- "Book & a Cover" and "Rosemary" -- are quality entries in
Vega's songbook, and once again feature the production skills of Froom and Blake. ~ Ted Mills, All Music Guide
