Styx

Greatest Hits Part 2 (1996)

  1.A.D. 1928
  2.Rockin' The Paradise
  3.Light Up
  4.Sing For The Day
  5.First Time
  6.Mademoiselle
  7.Snowblind
  8.Boat On The River
  9.Borrowed Time
 10.Lights
 11.Queen Of Spades
 12.Love at First Sight
 13.Haven't We Been Here Before
 14.Superstars
 15.Little Suzie
 16.It Takes Love

The casual listener should be warned: this is not a continuation of where the first greatest hits package left off - which is how most "Part Twos" tend to be. This collection should be viewed as a companion piece to the first Greatest Hits CD released the prior year. A more appropriate title might be something like : "Styx's songs that never quite made it but are still pretty good". Or something like that.

Styx was about to embark on a summer tour that would prove to be more successful than anyone (band members included) could imagine. The record label must have thought that they should release something to accompany the tour, so this is what we have. Several of these songs were minor singles or songs that did receive minimal airplay (First Time, Sing For The Day,Love at First Sight) and there are plenty of others that all fans tend to revere as much as singles and were still concert favorties (Rockin' The Paradise, Queen of Spades, Snowblind) so it's not a total ripoff.

However, as these packages seem to indicate, it was necessary to add a few new songs so all the old time devotees could shell out another fifteen bucks or so. Ironically, our two new songs were penned by Glen Burtnik who was now out of the band with the return of Tommy Shaw. To make the purchase a further more complicated dilemma, these two songs were quite good. The first, Little Suzie is a return to the Pieces of Eight style of Styx. It rocks harder than anything they had done in some time. The Burtnik original, was actually recorded on his solo album and had the original title "Little Lucy's Blues". And, yep, Tommy Shaw was indeed back. That's him wailing his way through the song sounding as if he was loving every minute of it. The other new song was a much slower ballad that seemed more contemporary in style. The piece It Takes Love is a much more mellow piece (DeYoung sings this one, of course) and it's rumored that Burtnik does play piano on the song and actually even sings the last "ooooohhh" and the end of the song. The packaging on this cd was obviously very low budget, but all in all, the two new songs make it necessary to own.

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