Al Green- Greatest Hits

I’m in a difficult position here, mostly because this is probably my favorite album. I won’t say Of All Time (note the capital letters) because I’m afraid of that kind of commitment, but it’s been a consistent favorite ever since around junior year of high school. This site is not going to pretend to be objective, that’s not the issue, the issue is that to me, this albums virtues are so self evident as to be inexpressible. Bertrand Russel and Alfred North Whitehead wrote a hefty book trying to prove that 1+1=2 and I find myself in that sort of predicament now.

Let’s start with the obvious: this is a short album. Or rather, it feels short. It’s ten songs, around forty minutes all in all, but put it on and you get sucked through some kind of worm hole where three minutes is somehow equal to one. This wormhole phenomenon is due to how tightly arranged all the pieces are.

What I mean here is that all the parts (horns strings and Al Green’s voice) are all working together to create a unified whole, many voices, many people coming together to create something bigger. That’s all well and pretentious enough, but what really sets certain songs apart is the lack of wasted notes. These aren’t Mozart. No one could accuse Al Green of having “too many notes.”

“But what of specific songs, do any stand out?” I hear you ask. Often on albums there is one or two songs that stand out. These are usually the single that gets the most airplay. Sometimes there’s the opposite problem, where an album must be listened to as a whole in order to be appreciated, and no one song stands out above the rest. Al Green’s Greatest Hits avoids all of those problems by having every single song on the album be a possible single. You can listen to this album one song at a time, or all at once and it loses none of its quality. So forgive me if I don’t go into specifics, otherwise you’d get ten miniature essays in a post that I already feel is too long.

One more thing: this album has a heart to it, beyond technical goodness. It’s a romantic album, and unironic about being romantic. Al Green is tired of being alone. He Wants. To get next to you, to stay together, for his girl to come back home. This is the truly unarticulatable part. Maybe you need to be a lonely boy driving the back roads of small town Virginia in order for this to speak to you on the level it does me, but I contend that even if it doesn’t cause your chest to ache and a lump to form in your throat you’ll still be able to appreciate something about this album.

5/5 Go listen to this now. I’m going to too after I post this.