Ten years removed from his last gold-selling album,
Dan Fogelberg retains an extensive catalog ripe for profit-taking, or rather, his label, Epic Records does. That's the rationale for this compilation. The "love songs" theme, as usual with a pop star, is practically meaningless; love is the subject of most pop songs, after all. Here, it is simply a cover for not calling the album "the best-of"
Fogelberg, even though, among the ten selections, seven were pop Top 40 hits and two more were AC chart entries. (The exception, drawn from
Fogelberg's most recent album,
River of Souls, is "A Love Like This.") There are different kinds of love, of course, and in the songs here,
Fogelberg goes beyond just romantic love. "Longer" is a song of romantic love, however, and with lyrics so poetic and music so sweet that it could be used as a wedding song, and no doubt has been many times. But the autobiographical "Leader of the Band" is about a son's love of his father, and "Run for the Roses" is a second-person narrative addressed to a racehorse. (Well, OK, who doesn't love horses?) The inclusion of some later, less-well-known songs seems to be an attempt either to reanimate
Fogelberg's declining sales or just cover the breadth of his career. But "Seeing You Again" (from
Exiles) is a melodramatic, generalized version of a theme he explored to greater effect in "Same Old Lang Syne," which is also included. Most
Fogelberg fans will have these tracks already; this is just an unimaginative record company repackaging to squeeze a few more bucks out of his catalog. ~ William Ruhlmann