Premier album best of de l’artiste, la tracklist de l’album a été définie par les fans qui ont voté en mai 2002 sur le site officiel bjork.com. Les 5 titres préférés ont été choisis, dans un premier temps, parmi 74 morceaux de sa carrière solo et dans un deuxième temps, parmi les singles.
Graphisme
Dessin : Gabriela Fridriksdóttir
Design : M/M (Paris)
Infos
La liste finale se compose de 15 chansons :
4 titres tirés de l’album Debut
5 titres de Post
3 de Homogenic
2 de Vespertine
L’unique titre inédit It’s In Our Hands, issu de la période Vespertine, sert de single à la sortie de la compilation.
Selmasongs n’a pas été proposé au vote, Björk ne le considérant pas comme un album au même titre que les autres.
La sortie du greatest hits est conjointe avec celles du Family Tree et de la Live Box
Björk à propos de l’album
"Whilst this is a "Greatest Hits", it is really more of a retrospective for me. It is not only about the singles, but how I felt I learned and how I got there. The visual side of it was to get a close friend of mine, an Icelandic artist, a girl called Gabriela to help. She also had to struggle with the four branches, being an Icelandic artist, having Icelandic roots, which are mostly caught up these sagas and mythology, having to face the fact that there is no such thing as Icelandic modern art, so you can invent it. Just like I did with Icelandic pop music, which was a great freedom for me, so I didn’t have to struggle with people like The Beatles or Jimi Hendrix or something, I could just start from scratch, almost. Gabriela has the academic branch as me too, she went to an art school where she was told a lot about German artists, and how if you are a woman born in Iceland, thirty years ago, what on earth would you have in common with European Art History - almost nothing. So to try first of all to reject it and then to later on find that you have some of that in you as it was shown to you in school for ten years. I think any Icelander is a poet, as I have said before, everybody in Iceland at least sometimes read the poetry books and the language pretty fierce - this has become our identity through the ages. So Gabriela, my friend, has some pieces where she has dealt with that too. The fourth branch where we have dealt with foreign influences, that we are Icelandic and are up for the volcanoes and the hot springs and all that, we get really pissed off as being categorised as some sort of Eskimos or Elves. We think of ourselves as being really quite modern, we do modern things. So there is that side too, and she has done the artwork for the tree as a result."
source : David Toop Interview , 2002
The album is called ’Greatest Hits’ I am just wondering what your general feelings about ’Greatest Hits’ albums are. Does a ’Greatest Hits’ album give a good synopsis of an artists’ career ?
I think, like with everything, there are a lot of bad ’Greatest Hits’ albums and there are a lot of good ones. Just like with everything, the percentage is : some are 10% good and 90 % are rubbish. Although I still think it’s worth the risk to at least try. There are some ’Greatest Hits’ albums out there that I have loved, with music I am not so familiar with. For example, I was twenty-five when I found out that Marvin Gaye existed, I didn’t know soul music before that. I got some kind of singles collection or ’Greatest Hits’ of his.
I think you also have to trust people as well. Some of the Marvin Gaye collections were not so good when you just play number three or track nine or something, and the other ones were fantastic, like every song was excellent and the structure was perfect. So I think it is possible.
source : interview David Toop
