Drive-By Truckers Greatest Hits

So the Drive-By Truckers have released a greatest hits album, although they’ve never had a hit per se. I’m not quite sure what the market is for this. They are a band that you need to buy the album to get the point, they don’t get enough radio play for the casual listener to tentatively explore the band through such a collection. But hey, whatever. It’s worth mentioning as a starting point to think what songs should go on a compilation album. Here’s the track list. I’ve always thought the band didn’t always have the right sense of what single to release (Let There Be Rock for instance was a very weird song to promote from Southern Rock Opera). Some of the included songs on the compilation don’t seem quite right (Three Dimes Down and Lookout Mountain come to mind, though the last is a great live song). Brighter than Creation’s Dark is underrepresented, with only 1 song. Perusing recent set-lists, it also seems they aren’t playing a whole lot of tunes off that album. Not sure why that would be.

Anyway, here’s my choices, with at least 1 song from each album covered by the compilation (through Brighter than Creation’s Dark). Feel free to offer your alternatives:

From Gangstabily:
1) “The Living Bubba”–their first great song

From Pizza Deliverance
2) “The Company I Keep”

From Southern Rock Opera
3) “Ronnie and Neil”
4) “Let There Be Rock”
5) “Women Without Whiskey”–this is one of my favorite songs of all time
6) “Zip City”

From Decoration Day
7) “Sink Hole”
8) “Marry Me”
9) “Outfit”
10) “Decoration Day”

From The Dirty South
11) “Where the Devil Don’t Stay”
12) “Puttin’ People on the Moon”
13) “The Sands of Iwo Jima”

From A Blessing and a Curse
14) “Gravity’s Gone”

From Brighter than Creation’s Dark
15) “The Righteous Path”
16) “Self Destructive Zones”

This seems better to me. A better collection would find room for “A Ghost to Most” and “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac,” but you do what you can.