Well: that’s cool. I know I’ve used the word a lot in this piece already, but there’s no other word for it. It’s just flat-out so-glad-I-own-this-record how’d-I-ever-get-by-without-it I’ve-got-it-and-you-don’t cool. By presenting the record as an artifact rather than a masterpiece, the liner notes give the songs room to breathe. And what songs are they? Well, one of them is “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher,” which, despite Rita Coolidge’s infamous attempt to murder it in the ‘70s by dispassionately draining all the blood out of it, remains one of the greatest pop singles ever recorded. But, and this really is what makes this record so wicked-ass, get this: that’s the only song on this record you’ve heard before, assuming you’re a casual listener to rather than a fanatic follower of ‘60s soul. The album documents songs recorded by Jackie Wilson in Chicago, his earlier recordings having been made in New York and Detroit. It’s not a Greatest Hits, nor an obscurities and B-sides. It’s a ledger, sort of. Neither “Reet Petite” nor “Whispers (Gettin’ Louder)” are here (the latter’s absence being somewhat puzzling as the notes inform us that the first album recorded by Wilson in Chicago was called Whispers). Instead there are singles that peaked at #45, which means that the oldies stations don’t play them now, but which doesn’t say anything about their quality, which is uniformly quite high. A number of these songs were written by the Chi-Lites’ lead vocalist Eugene Record, whose feel for smooth soul compositions is practically unmatched. The songs from Wilson’s final album are lighter and warmer than a summer breeze blowing through the palm trees at Venice Beach, and his singing voice is one of the best of all time, period. The dull non-presentation added to the nineteen obscure gems plus “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” (whose greatness is so unfathomable and undeniable that its future status as our national anthem is dependent only on our rallying together in common cause: click here) makes for one of the most compelling, living-breathing-evidence-that-some-benevolent-force-in-the-universe-loves-us artifacts I’ve ever come across. Greatest Hits collections per se still suck, the Steve Miller band (and Abba, for that matter, and Judas Priest) excepted, but their ideological progeny have something to recommend themselves. Let us now with heart and voice praise unintended secondary effects.