Legendary songwriter, vocalist, guitarist and 19-time Grammy Award-winner Eric Clapton will release a brand-new ‘Best Of’ compilation, entitled Forever Man via Reprise Records on May 15th. Featuring 51 tracks over three CDs, Forever Man spans three decades of Clapton’s Reprise Records years and features classic studio tracks and a blues-themed disc.
The collection traces much of Clapton’s career featuring the Grammy Award-winning tracks “Change The World”, “Tears In Heaven”, “Bad Love” and including materials from Eric’s Grammy Award-winning albums From The Cradle and Unplugged. Guest performers include B.B. King and J.J. Cale.
Review
As the first compilation covering Eric Clapton's Reprise/Warner work
since 2007's Complete Clapton, 2015's Forever Man is the third collection to
focus specifically on these recordings from the '80s, '90s, and 2000s, and
it's by far the most extensive, weighing in at two CDs in its basic edition and
three in its deluxe. The difference between the two is the addition of a disc of
“Blues,” a nice addition to the “Studio” and “Live” discs of the
collection. These themes make sense on paper but they're a little odd in
practice, with the Studio selections hopscotching between eras and the live
heavy on new millennial selections. Often, the length highlights how light
Forever Man is on hits: “Tears in Heaven,” “I've Got a Rock N Roll
Heart,” “Forever Man,” “Change the World,” “My Father's Eyes,”
“Pretending,” “Bad Love,” “It's in the Way That You Use It,” and
the unplugged “Layla” are all here, but the sequencing suggests how the '70s
hits are missing (or present in new live versions). It is hardly a botched
collection – in pure consumer terms, this delivers a lot of bang for the
buck – but it winds up asking more questions than it answers.
Allmusic.com