Album Review: Various Artist - ‘Ultimate Grammy Collection - Contemporary Pop’

By Jeff Swindoll Dec 13, 2007, 22:20 GMT

The movie industry has the Oscar and the music industry has the Grammys.  The Grammy Awards have been around since 1959 (then called the Grammaphone Awards – anybody remember those?) and have been presented annually by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. 

If there’s one thing that might be better than a “best of” from a particular is a collection of award-winning songs.  This CD covers 1992 to 2006 and covers a variety of Grammy categories. 

For example, the most current winner John Mayer’s “Gravity” (2006) won for best pop vocal album (“Continuum”) but the specific song didn’t really win.  So just don’t expect that all the songs on the album are exactly Grammy winners. 

However, some of them are including song of the year “Kiss from a Rose” by Seal, “Change the World” by Eric Clapton, and “Sonny Came Home” by Shawn Colvin.  I guess that one thing that I discovered from listening to the songs, besides realizing that some of these did win Grammys, is that I could pretty much pinpoint the time frame that I stopped listening to pop radio since I realized when I started to hear songs that I wasn’t familiar with. 

Oh well.  Norah Jones is the artist in the collection that has the largest laundry list of awards for 2002’s “Don’t Know Why.” 

I enjoyed this compilation and liked being able to catch up on pop music as I seemed to stopped listening to pop radio in 1997-ish (oldies station and CDs are my main diet now).