Dionne Warwick - Walk On By: The Definitive Dionne Warwick Collection (2CD) (2000)

By using the much-abused word "definitive" in the title, the U.K. branch of Warner Music has a lot to live up to in this two-CD Dionne Warwick compilation. Happily, Warner controls not only the recordings Warwick made for Warner Bros. Records in the 1970s, but also the Scepter Records catalog that contains her 1960s hits. Thus, the label had access to her work from 1962 up until 1978. The compilers have taken a roughly chronological approach, beginning with her first U.S. single, "Don't Make Me Over," and including all of her American Top 40 hits of the period (and all her U.K. chart entries), with one exception. They don't seem to have realized that Warwick's 1970 hit with "Make It Easy on Yourself" was a recently recorded live version, and so they have stuck her 1963 studio recording in among the early-'70s tracks midway through the second disc. Ten lower chart entries are also missing, the most successful of them being "The Green Grass Starts to Grow," which reached number 43 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1971, and the most notable of them being Warwick's take on "If We Only Have Love" from the Off-Broadway musical revue Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. The compilers have substituted Warwick's covers of several standards, including songs written by her main songwriters of the '60s, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, that became hits for others: "(They Long to Be) Close to You," "What the World Needs Now Is Love," and "The Look of Love." Toward the end, as the hits begin to peter out in the mid-'70s, the compilers include a few non-hit recordings that found Warwick working with the well-known writer/producer teams of Linda Creed and Thom Bell ("Track of the Cat") and Holland-Dozier-Holland ("Don't Let My Teardrops Bother You," "I Think You Need Love"). The result isn't quite definitive, but with 40 tracks in two hours and 15 minutes, containing nearly all of Warwick's memorable recordings of the 1960s and the first half of the '70s, it comes very close.