One of the most oldest and most enticing thought exercises in pop music is: What if (artist) had released the best songs from (double album) as a single disc instead? Pre-Internet, folks used their cassette decks to create their own truncated versions of likes of The Beatles' White Album ("Revolution 9" has to go, for sure) and Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (sorry, "Jamaica Jerk-Off"), some out of artistic vision, others because the tape just wasn't long enough to hold all the songs. Now, with mp3s and streaming, we have the ability to curate everything for ourselves, which means even a single album could be reduced to an EP of your faves, with the shuffle feature making it so the order doesn't even have to be the same every time. Here's where I could detour into a healthy digression about the negative consequences of that total freedom, but I'll resist the temptation. Our good friends Weezer - who are not typically known for rest
Here's the drill: Twelve songs to summarize an artist's career, in chronological order. This one features... Pete Droge was an unlikely discovery in the early 1990s Seattle music scene: a folk singer with a twang. He released three albums on major labels between 1994 and 1998, got a couple of songs on film soundtracks, made a cameo in Almost Famous, joined supergroup The Thorns, and released two albums and two EPs independently. Here's a primer, though I'd recommend seeing out 1996's Find a Door in its entirety. It's one of my favorite albums of all time. (If you've got Amazon Prime, listen along here .) 1. "If You Don't Love Me (I'll Kill Myself)" ( Necktie Second , 1994) Works as both a parody of a certain type of song as well as a good example of that same type of song, namely the romantic lament. 2. "Beautiful Girl" ( Songs from the Miramax Motion Picture Beautiful Girls , 1996) This played over the credits of a movie that&#