Time-Life's Singers and Songwriters series, its name a slight takeoff on singer/songwriter -- the term given to a group of recording artists following in the wake of Bob Dylan and other performers of the '60s who introduced the previously foreign notion that singers could write their own songs -- is naturally centered in the '70s, when the singer/songwriter movement really took hold. But by the mid-'70s, when it was just as common for singers to be songwriters as it had been uncommon before, the term had become virtually synonymous with soft rock popular music, and that's really what is presented for the most part on the Time-Life collections. This one, the 12th in the series, is typical, containing 24 tracks on two CDs or cassettes, with perhaps only one track, Carole King's "Nightingale," that fits into the strict definition of singer/songwriter music, even though 17 of the songs were generated by the performers themselves. Also typical is the use of hits, though this far into the series the compilers are relying more on the secondary successes of already minor figures like Gerry Rafferty and Firefall; nevertheless, every track here was a Top 40 hit, with one, Olivia Newton-John's "Have You Never Been Mellow," a chart-topper. That the set does not consist entirely of the biggest hits of its artists, however, may be something of a virtue for its intended audience of nostalgic, late baby-boomers who know that the Little River Band and Ambrosia had more than one hit and who remember the one big hit by Sammy Johns. By delving so deeply into '70s soft rock, Time-Life is getting beyond the same bunch of songs that everybody anthologizes and simultaneously demonstrating the breadth of a style that quietly dominated its era, even if it attracted less attention than other popular styles of the time. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide