‘The Best of Albums 1-8‘ by Daffod'i'll

For the past three years, former Gods Toys & I vocalist Dill has been making up for the time lost out of music for personal & health reasons by becoming the most prolific of writers & recorders of original material you can imagine & has also become a confident & idiosyncratic instrumentalist, playing on all his tracks in this series.

I have reviewed all eight of his albums (issued under the stage name "Daffod'i'll") during this period between 2017 & 2020 (though on a couple of occasions, so rapidly did they come out that I have been obliged to review several together. In chronological order of release they are:

‘Artificial Intelli-gent'

‘I-Magi-Nation'

‘Love & Peace!'

‘Go-Spell-Truth-Heaven'

‘I Wondered Lonesome As a Crowd'

‘Purrr-fection!'

‘Sky Blue Pink'

‘Pink Blue Sky'

Now Dill has distilled the  98 songs down to fifteen for a compilation, (‘The Best of Albums 1​-​8‘) namely:

"How Are You?", "Hi!" "You Handle It", "Cathy Come Home", "Here She Comes",  "Eye N Eyes", "Summer Sunrise", "Crackpot Dream" , "Africa", "Is She",  "Sunshine Girl", "America", "Boom Boom Bang Baby", "Without a Word" and "The Kingdom of Heaven" (please see my previous reviews for my take on each of these).

I'm not sure how he managed to do this nor what criteria were applied (I  could imagine good cases being made for songs such as "MASS , Everything OK", "Flowers", "Galileo Galilei Galilee" "Babble On Babylon" or "See the Lightning, Beat the Rock") and perhaps the album could also be seen as a good sampler collection to introduce people to his very individual style & diverse set of styles : like Island Records used to do so well both for genres & to develop interests in then neglected & often equally idiosyncratic artists like Nick Drake. So, if you are coming fresh to his recent work, this may well be your best starting point before exploring the whole series.