Ahtough her commercial breakthrough didn't come until late 1994, Sheryl Crow's musical career dates back to the late 1980s. Originally working as a music teacher and moonlighting in various bands, she progressed to singing advertising jingles and eventually to working as a backup singer for various high profile artists. Crow recorded what was intended to be her debut solo album in 1992, originally planned to be self-titled but ultimately shelved in favor of 1993's Tuesday Night Music Club. It may have been an inauspicious beginning, but it proved to be career gold after the album finally took off late the following year. I remember hearing "All I Wanna Do" at the time, and her subsequent albums' singles "My Favorite Mistake" and "Soak Up the Sun" as they got released, but I didn't really board the Sheryl Crow train to any extent until well into the 2010s. So I'm something of a very late comer to this very talented singer/guitarist's musical catalog. And I only recently (as of this writing) acquired a copy of her first "best of" collection in order to satisfy the completist in me. I would consider it a good introduction to the first part of her recording career for a casual fan, but given that copies of her first four albums are all fairly common in the secondhand market and in bargain bins, is it worth picking up from an audiophile perspective?
Note: Three songs, "The First Cut Is the Deepest," "Light in Your Eyes," and "The First Cut Is the Depeest (Country Version)" are unique to the compilation album and are thus omitted from the below comparisons.
