I was beginning to wonder when a compilation such as Polaroids: A Greatest Hits Collection (Columbia) would be coming out to sum up the first fifteen years of Shawn Colvin’s incredible career. The fifteen tracks (including the bonus track cover of Lennon and McCartney’s “I’ll Be Back) are a modest summation of an artist who is so much more than her “hits.” In fact, Colvin’s once certifiable hit, “Sunny Came Home,” finally gave FM radio listeners and VH1 viewers a chance to experience what her devoted legions had been enjoying over the course of her three previously released albums and her amazing live shows. But a single disc can’t even begin to reveal Colvin’s many layers, and listeners owe it to themselves to seek out her numerous movie soundtrack-only recordings, for instance, or her holiday music CD, not to mention her concert renditions of any number of Crowded House tunes.

Taken as a whole, the seventeen tracks (including three new recordings) on Greatest Hits: My Prerogative (Jive/Zomba), say as much about Britney Spears as they do about the current state of the music industry. Even with the demise of the seven-inch single, Spears spewed inconsequential hit singles at an impressive rate. The songs, many of which were written by committee (“Toxic” and new cut “I’ve Just Begun”) or sound like Abba cast-offs (“Crazy,” “Stronger,” “…Baby One More Time”) or both, gave the pre-fab Disney doll something to wrap her lips around while she focused on her dance moves and abdominal muscles. By the time she hooked up with Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams of The Neptunes on her third album (for “Boys” and “I’m A Slave For You”), she was already a superstar. Thus she was able to lock lips in synch with Madonna, the godmother of bad pop divas (on Me Against The Music) and get “Outrageous” with the notorious R. Kelly. Dance music addicts will be pleased with the five-track limited edition bonus remix disc.

Where Britney saw fit to cover Bobby Brown on her hits collection, Mandy Moore beat her to the punch, exhibiting her superior taste in cover material with 2003’s Coverage on which she tackled XTC, The Waterboys, Carole King, Elton John, Carly Simon, Joan Armatrading and Joni Mitchell. Four of those songs can be found on The Best of Mandy Moore (Epic) on which listeners have the chance to hear Moore grow from being a Britney competitor (“Candy”) to a Janet Jackson imitator (“Walk Me Home”), to quickly becoming her own person (“Crush” and “Only Hope”). If you saw her performance in the 2004 black comedy, you also know that Moore has it all over Spears in the acting department, as well.

Comparing Matador Records’ Greatest Hits 1999-2004, as disc one of Matador At Fifteen (Matador) is called, to say Britney, or even Mandy, one comes up a bit short. That’s not to say that the eighteen songs on the first disc aren’t all great in their own right. I mean, how can you go wrong with Interpol (“Obstacle 1”), The New Pornographers (“The Laws Have Changed”), Cat Power (“Free”), Guided By Voices (“My Kind of Soldier”) Yo La Tengo (“Don’t Have To Be So Sad”), Belle and Sebastian (“Don’t Leave The Light On Baby”), and even queer acts such as Matmos (“For The Trees”) and Thalia Zedek (“1926”)? Even the second disc of unreleased tracks and rarities is better than what passes for hits on most collections. If all this simply isn’t enough, say olé to a twelve-video DVD featuring Mogwai, Pavement, Mary Timony, Stephen Malkmus and others.

I usually prefer my greatest hits compilations to be in chronological order, but in the case of grunge groundbreakers Pearl Jam, I actually prefer the way in which they have presented the thirty-three tracks on their double disc set Rearviewmirror (Greatest Hits 1991-2003) (Epic). Not to imply that there is no chronology, the songs are in album release order, but they are also split into Up Side and Down Side discs. This thoughtful collection keeps in mind that not everyone was a fan of PJ’s particular brand of scream-o tunes (“Even Flow,” “Go,” “Spin The Black Circle,” “Hail Hail,” and “Do The Evolution”) and separated them from the band’s, dare I say, more mellow selections, such as “Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town,” “Betterman,” “Wishlist,” and “Yellow Ledbetter,” to mention a few.

Nirvana, Pearl Jam’s fellow Seattle grunge-gods, are also given the career retrospective treatment with the massive four-disc (three CDs/one DVD) set With The Lights Out (DGC). First and foremost, this package should be experienced with the lights on, so you can see the cool heat-sensitive casing and so that you can read the sixty page booklet. Jam-packed with early (beginning in 1987) recordings, demos, rehearsals, rough, acoustic, and live performances, With The Lights Out is a seriously unrelenting blast of raging vocals and guitar/bass/drums noise that evolved into one of the sounds that defined the nineties.

Awake: The Best of Live (Radioactive) is a thorough double disc set (one CD/one DVD) that is not only chronological, but also offers liner-notes commentary by charismatic front-man Ed Kowalczyk about each successive album. Disc one’s centerpiece is, of course, the extraordinary hit singles from Throwing Copper, the band’s triumphal second disc, including “Selling The Drama,” “I Alone,” “Lightning Crashes,” and “All Over You,” all of which were an essential East Coast counterpoint to Pearl Jam’s Seattle sound.

Few hits collections are as straightforward as Singles (Epic) by underappreciated Glaswegian quartet Travis. The eighteen singles, some of which received airplay and attention in the States, function to remind us of Travis’s undeniable pop chops. Like Live, Travis really came into their own on their second album, The Man Who, which is represented by “Driftwood” and “Why Does It Always Rain On Me?,” and ran with it on the third disc The Invisible Man, which included “Sing,” “Side” and “Flowers In The Window,” all of which are found here, alongside tracks from Travis’s debut disc and its fourth album. Singles is a pleasure from start to finish.

I first got turned on to songwriter and singer Rodney Crowell when he was married to one of my favorite musicians, Rosanne Cash. After learning about his work with Emmylou Harris and Mary Kay Place, my respect for Crowell increased incrementally. However, it was with 2001’s The Houston Kid, which contained the song “Wandering Boy,” about two brothers, one of whom was gay, that Crowell earned my complete respect. The Essential Rodney Crowell (Columbia/Legacy) does what it can, as a single disc, to provide an overview of Crowell’s prolific Columbia years, and also looks back at his Warner Brothers period, as well as his work for Sugar Hill. The disc also includes two 2004 re-recordings of the songs “I Ain’t Living Long Like This” and “‘Til I Gain Control Again.”

Almost as well-known for his trumpet playing and his nearly inescapable (at least during 1978) hit single “Feels So Good” as he was for his fedora, trumpeter Chuck Mangione spent time with the Columbia Records family after his A&M tenure, and The Best of Chuck Mangione (Columbia/Legacy) collects ten tracks from that period.

Saxophonist Wayne Shorter has been a key figure on the contemporary jazz scene for more than 40 years. In addition to playing with such jazz legends as Art Blakey and Miles Davis, Shorter went on to co-found the jazz-fusion unit Weather Report, and even performed with Brazilian superstar Milton Nascimento. His guest appearances on disc by Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell are so highly regarded that tracks from those collaborations have been included on Shorter’s own double disc anthology Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter (Columbia/Legacy).