Creed - With Arms Wide Open: A Retrospective (2015)

Arriving over a decade after the simple single-disc Greatest Hits, With Arms Wide Open: A Retrospective triples its predecessor by offering three distinct thematic discs in its march through the past. First up is "Best Of: The Singles," a 16-track collection of the songs that made it onto charts all around the world. Of their 18 singles, only two are missing -- "Riders on the Storm," from a 2001 tribute to the Doors, and "Hide," which was only a single in Australia -- and they're by and large presented in their radio edits (although one of these, "Higher," is called a "Top 40 Version," and "Rain" is in its "Pop Mix"). The only real departure from this template is "With Arms Wide Open," which is presented in a "New Version with Strings," the only brand-new addition to the collection, so it serves as fan bait while also possibly confounding casual fans who want to have the original hit versions of all the singles. Then again, those listeners probably won't have much use for the other two discs in the collection, which amount to a CD of "Rarities & Demos" and a CD of "Acoustic." Bonus tracks, live cuts, covers (including two Doors songs), and other oddities provide the bulk of the second disc, while most of the third is devoted to live acoustic versions, none of them sourced and sometimes present in shaky fidelity that is nevertheless acceptable because those performances are more interesting than the ones with crisper audio. All and all, it's hard not to shake the notion that this is a set for fans who used to collect all of Creed's singles and now just want to have them in a handy set, either for reasons of nostalgia or devotion.