Captain Beefheart once commented how much he loved painting the desert because it was "subtle, so subtle". The same can also be said of John Fahey's guitar playing. The work collected for this Best Of has a unity of approach that defies the eighteen-year period it draws on without ever seeming static. Constantly shifting melodically, tonally and harmonically, the music develops through subtle intuition rather than creative leaps and bounds.
The sacred tunes - In Christ There Is No East Or West, I'm Going To Do All I Can For My Lord - possess a haunting beauty that is echoed in more recent contemporary experimental work such as Gavin Bryars' Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Poor Boy (Long Ways From Home) and Fare Forward Voyagers remain two of Fahey's classic performances, here given serious competition from sixteen other brilliant recordings
by John Crosby