Doing a 180: Emmylou Harris, Profile

There are some purists who turn up their noses at greatest-hits collections, using the excuse that you don't really need a greatest-hits collection if you care enough about the artist to have all of their albums in the first place, but those people are just being silly. After all, even if you already have Pieces of the Sky, Elite Hotel, Luxury Liner, and Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town, why wouldn't you also want the convenience of being able to listen to the best songs from those albums distilled into a single LP? (Surely we're not the only ones who sometimes feel a little too lazy to keep getting up and switching album after album.)

As you might've guessed, that wasn't just an offhanded example in the previous paragraph: we've just reissued Emmylou Harris's Profile on 180-gram vinyl, and if you're a fan of '70s country-rock stylings, you'll love every one of these 12 tracks.

Given her reputation as a top-notch interpreter of other artists' material, it's no surprise that Harris's name only appears as a songwriter on one track - “Boulder to Birmingham,” a co-write with Bill Danoff - but that's hardly a bad thing when you consider the composers of the other 11 songs: Earl Montgomery (“One of These Days”), Don Gibson (“Sweet Dreams”), Dolly Parton (“To Daddy”), Chuck Berry (“[You Never Can Tell] C'est La Vie”), Jimmy Work (“Making Believe”), Susanna Clark and Carlene Carter Routh (“Easy from Now On”), Buck Owens (“Together Again”), Charlie and Ira Louvin (“If I Could Only Win Your Love”), Billy Sherrill (“Too Far Gone”), Delbert McClinton (“Two More Bottles of Wine”), and A.P. Carter (“Hello Stranger”).

Give it a spin: '70s country-rock doesn't come much better.