In Dreams: The Greatest Hits by Roy Orbison

In Dreams: The Greatest Hits, a two-record set Roy Orbison put out on Virgin Records in 1987, isn't the old hits dusted off; it's Orbison singing them all over again. He cut fresh versions in 1986 with Mike Utley co-producing, and the title track came last, in April 1987, with T-Bone Burnett and film director David Lynch sharing the controls. The originals were mostly Monument sides from 1960 to 1964, plus "Ooby Dooby" from his Sun days in 1956 and "Claudette", the song he wrote that the Everly Brothers took into the charts in 1958.

The voice is the point, and it hadn't lost a thing: that operatic swoop through dark, heart-wrenched ballads, still capable of stopping a room. "Oh, Pretty Woman" still struts, too. The set arrived the same year the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him, and four of its songs later turned up on Rolling Stone's 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.