This is not what becomes a legend most, but it will do for the part-time fans who understand Sting and his former band to be part of a steady radio-hits continuum rather than a rock-evolution one. Cleverly, this compilation is both semi-exhaustive, with eighteen tracks, and achronological, making the radio-hits perspective incontrovertible. Because however expansive Sting's musical worldview grows, incorporating jazzesque and American soul with the reggae-bottomed Police sound, the songs are sturdy and companionable, traveling from the jerky comforts of "Message in a Bottle" to the sparkling "Fields of Gold" to the admonishing delights of — omigod! Remember prom? — "Roxanne," with efficiency and literary verve intact on every note. Completists will scoff, but so what? They're outnumbered.

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”