This is one I am going to regret. When a band is so endeared to you, it becomes hard to do a project like this because it is simply too hard to cut songs. Early on it looked like around 16 or 17 was going to be the number of songs this disc was going to handle. My first draft came in around 34 songs, so there was a lot of cutting to be done.

First I marked the essentials, in the case of Cracker I came up with about 11, I think. These were songs that simply could not be cut. This list included the usual suspects; Low, Euro Trash Girl, Something You Ain’t Got, etc.

To select the next about four songs would be increasingly difficult as I went on. There is also a small worry I had that I would like every album to be represented as well. In Cracker’s case, they have 8 proper albums, so that is eight songs and overall I would have to average about 2 songs per album.

Inevitably there are long songs that if they were to get cut it would be much easier but I simply do not want to make a cut based on the running time of a song. In this case the song happens to be “Another Song About The Rain.”

I narrowed the tracklist to 17 songs and needed to cut 3 more minutes, this means one more cut would do it but it will be the toughest. I decided to cut “Friends” off of Cracker’s latest cd “Sunrise In The Land of Milk and Honey.”

This meant that the albums; Sunrise, Golden Age and Greenland would only get one cut on this disc. Truly sad.

Here is the list that I am sure I will soon regret and want to change:

1. Brides of Neptune

2. Duty Free

3. Low

4. The Good Life

5. Something You Ain’t Got

6. Get Off This

7. Been Around The World

8. Mr. Wrong

9. Lonesome Johnny Blues

10. Shine

11. Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out, With Me

12. Teen Angst

13. Big Dipper

14. Euro-Trash Girl

15.Ain’t Gonna Suck Itself

16. Another Song About The Rain

Alright so the final tally is: Kerosene Hat=4 songs, Cracker=3, Gentlman’s Blues, Countrysides and Forever=2 each, and Sunrise, Golden Age and Greenland=only 1 song.

That is just the way it worked out; I could have gone a much different direction. I can imagine people thinking that Anther Song About The Rain, Ain’t Gonna Suck Itself and Lonesome Johnny Blues could get cut. Some songs are painful to cut but I could always make a 2-disc set to appease myself.