Sixty Number Ones

This two-disc collection of 50 No. 1 hits from the past twenty-two years sounded too good to be true. Turns out, it is. In order to squeeze 50 tracks onto two CDs, it was necessary to edit most of the songs on this collection. While I don't have a problem with fading out a song a few seconds early, many of these songs have been seriously edited. No fewer than eight songs have been shortened by at least twenty seconds and another six have been shortened by thirty seconds or more. The worst offender is the truncated version of "Carrying Your Love With Me," which was shortened by forty-three seconds. To the casual fan this may be no big deal, but any serious George Strait fan will notice the difference. It would have made more sense to simply add a third disc, as well as a few other top 10 songs. This may seem to fly in the face of the title, but they already included two tracks ("True" and "Run") which only reached no. 2. For nearly a quarter of a century Gearge Strait has been one of the best of country music's traditionalists, and he certainly needed an updated greatest hits package. However, fans deserved better than this doctored version. As for me, I'm going to stick with 1995's STRAIT OUT OF THE BOX.