Light My Fire - The Very Best of José Feliciano

Album Review

There are numerous José Feliciano best-ofs, but this 16-track compilation does a good job of getting the essentials onto one disc if you're looking for a distillation of his most popular English-language recordings from his commercial prime in the late '60s and early '70s. All of his chart hits are here, as is his theme song for "Chico and the Man," a 1974 recording that's the only song on the CD not originally released between 1968 and 1970. The 24-track Australian compilation And the Sun Will Shine (on the Raven label) actually makes for a more comprehensive overview of the era if you can find it, and has the significant advantage of including "Felice Navidad," which is somehow missing from this 2007 anthology. Still, this does have a few covers not on the Raven collection on which Feliciano puts his distinctive interpretive stamp, including "California Dreamin'" and the Beatles' "In My Life" and "Yesterday." It also has his live, controversial-at-the-time 1968 reworking of "The Star Spangled Banner," which actually made it onto an official RCA single the following year.