Roy Orbison was a superhero of song. Unassuming in appearance, he became someone extraordinary when his weeping tenor took flight, rising from deep, dark places on anguished ballads like "Only the Lonely" and "Crying." Orbison rebuilt the stark balladry of Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" as a jukebox opera house, expanded rock's arrangement limitations, and opened a door to Phil Spector and Freddie Mercury alike. This 107-track box captures Orbison's Fifties rockabilly beginnings on its first disc, where his energetic spurt at Sun Records gets eclipsed by unreleased demos that reveal tuneful talents primed to explode. The second disc sympathetically sequences his early-Sixties album tracks and B sides, yet more remarkable is how smoothly the third navigates from his triumphant '64 classic, "Oh, Pretty Woman," to his maligned Seventies output without quality plummet. The fourth disc documents his late-Eighties comeback, which justifiably lingered beyond his sudden 1988 passing. This is the only anthology that does justice to every stage of Orbison's career, not just the one lined with gold.

“Let My Love Open the Door”

A peppy, hopeful love song, "Let My Love Open the Door" became a U. S. Top Ten hit for Pete Townshend in 1980, anchored by the kind of repeating synthesizer figures that he'd used in some of the Who's recordings in the previous decade. Although Townshend brushed the song off as "just a ditty" in Rolling Stone shortly after its release, in 1996 he revealed it was about love of the holiest sort. "It's supposed to be about the power of God's love," he remarked. "That when you're in difficulty, whether it's major or minor, God's love is always there for you."