The Very Best of Rosanne Cash

1	The Wheel 4:20
2	The Way We Make a Broken Heart 3:54
3	Seven Year Ache 3:16
4	Hold on 3:38
5	On the Surface 2:57
6	No Memories Hangin' Around 3:26
7	My Baby Thinks He's a Train 3:14
8	I Don't Know Why You Don't Want Me 3:19
9	Blue Moon With Heartache 4:28
10	Western Wall 3:02
11	Tennessee Flat Top Box 3:16
12	September When It Comes 3:41
13	Sleeping in Paris 4:07
14	Never Be You previously unreleased / Alternate Version / Alternate Take 3:38
15	What We Really Want 3:31
16	Seventh Avenue 5:11

Barnes & Noble

A single disc doesn't afford much space to explore the work of an artist who's had a dozen chart-topping hits and remains one of her era's most important singer-songwriters. Nevertheless, The Very Best of Rosanne Cash stands as a model of retrospective assessment, managing to be both economical and sweeping. For starters, the song selections aren't limited to Cash's work with Columbia but rather include two numbers from her Capitol years: including one of the most powerful and moving moments on any Cash recording, "September When It Comes" (from 2003's Rules of Travel), which features dad Johnny Cash, who sings ominously of his fading faculties as he faces mortality. The other 14 songs span the younger Cash's catalog, from her impressive 1979 debut, Right or Wrong -- notable for the lead single, the lilting, Rodney Crowell–penned heartbreaker "No Memories Hangin' Around" (a duet with Bobby Bare) -- to her final Columbia album, The Wheel, represented here by three tracks, including the towering title song featuring Steuart Smith's amazing "circular" guitar solo. Crowell, Cash's ex, figures prominently here as both writer and producer, their work together prefiguring the New Traditionalist movement. Soon enough, Cash commanded a producer credit herself and delivered the searing, intensely personal Interiors album, which lends Very Best two numbers, one being the swaying, country-folk plea "What We Really Want." From the underrated Rhythm & Romance album comes this disc's lone new entry, a previously unissued version of the rocking "Never Be You." As an introduction to the scope of an important artist's body of work, this album can't be beat. David McGee

All Music Guide

Compiling "The Very Best" of Rosanne Cash from her Columbia catalog is a difficult proposition for anyone, especially on a single disc. She traveled many roads aesthetically, from the rollicking (then) new country of Seven Year Ache to her flirtation with '80s pop on Rhythm & Romance to her free-rolling rock, country, and folk classic King's Record Shop to the more introspective material on Interiors and The Wheel. But Legacy has done a fine job, beginning with the title track of personal transformation of "The Wheel" and careening through her career. There's the gender-bending folk-country classic "The Way We Make a Broken Heart" (written by John Hiatt) and the title track of Seven Year Ache. Along the way there are stops at "Hold On" from Rhythm & Romance and duets with father Johnny on "September When It Comes" and Bobby Bare on "No Memories Hangin' Around." And the real hits, like "My Baby Thinks He's a Train" and "Tennessee Flat Top Box" are here, too. But it's in the tracks like "What We Really Want," "I Don't Know Why You Don't Want Me," and "Sleeping in Paris" where the balance and depth of Cash's contribution really come to light. This set also has a previously unreleased version of "Never Be You." There are 16 cuts in all, and each of them is a pearl. This is as fitting an introduction to an artist as country music has ever produced. She's ultimately unclassifiable, and one suspects from the candid comments she makes in Alanna Nash's liner essay that she likes it that way. Highly recommended. Thom Jurek