Over the course of his career, Dan Fogelberg has become identified with a particular sort of heavily arranged soft rock. It is therefore particularly interesting to listen to his first album and hear him experimenting, seeking the balance between an overtly countrified sound and something more original and personal. Some things about Home Free show that Fogelberg had figured out his strengths well before he went near the studio. The songs here are better and more coherent than much of his later work, with a directness that makes it easy to gloss over the occasional banalities and platitudes. As always, his splendid delivery makes it easy to excuse the lyrical flaws; nobody else ever sounded this confessional and meditative while singing in front of a full orchestra. That string section appears on most tracks and sometimes verges on intrusive. Indeed, at times Norbert Putnam's production sounds so cinematic that one wonders if this is a film score, as on the opening "To the Morning." Happily, not every cut is this heavily produced, and lighter tunes like "Stars" and "Wysteria" have hints of country and bluegrass along with album-oriented rock in a style similar to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young or the Eagles. Sometimes the influences are very overt; the album's closer, "The River," sounds like a Neil Young outtake, from the bleak subject matter to the spare, pounding piano arrangement. Fogelberg toyed with a variety of styles on his first release, and though things aren't completely integrated, the album is all the better for it.

Time Life Music’s Singers & Songwriters: Troubadours offers up 34 rock, folk, and pop cuts from the '60s and '70s. The two-disc set, which is part of Time Life’s Singers & Songwriters series, hits mostly high notes, covering everything from soft rock (Dan Fogelberg's “Longer”) to hippie folk (Scott McKenzie's “San Francisco [Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair]”) to classic rock radio staples (Peter Frampton's "Baby, I Love Your Way").

A couple of years after the pop hits stopped, Dan Fogelberg took this detour down the bluegrass/traditional acoustic music road. The result is a fine collection of mostly original songs, an album that holds up better than much of his earlier, better-known work. Accompanied by some of Nashville's top studio aces, Fogelberg sings of the California gold rush in the beautiful "Sutter's Mill," accompanies Doc Watson, Jerry Douglas and David Grisman on the instrumental bluegrass workout "Wolf Creek," and leads his all-star group speeding through several other bluegrass-flavored rave-ups. There's a touch of gospel here as well, with Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs pitching in on vocal harmonies. By the time of this album's release in the mid-'80s, pop radio was no longer playing the music of mellow singer/songwriters like Fogelberg, but the lovely ballad "Go Down Easy" found some airplay on contemporary country stations. Although the set-closing "The Higher You Climb" is a too-long slow drag similar to some of the singer's earlier overblown productions, High Country Snows is a surprising musical high point for Dan Fogelberg.

Time Life Music’s Singers & Songwriters: Classics features 20 cuts, almost all of which were culled from the singer/songwriter-rich 1970s. Featuring a solid mix of certifiable classics including “Still Crazy After All These Years” (Paul Simon), “(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay” (Otis Redding), and “Everybody's Talkin'” (Harry Nilsson) along with artist high watermarks such as “Leader of the Band” (Dan Fogelberg), “Sundown” (Gordon Lightfoot), and “For What It’s Worth” (Buffalo Springfield), Classics dutifully replicates a classic rock radio Sunday playlist.

This double-CD release from Britain's Beat Goes On label should interest anyone who's even slightly serious in appreciating Dan Fogelberg's music. For starters, in the absence of any upgrades since the late '80s in the sound of Sony Music's domestic Fogelberg CDs, the remastering of Souvenirs is more than a little welcome – the man's whole early catalog ought to have been remastered long before 2006, based on the crisp results here and the fresh edge it adds to music that is otherwise extremely familiar. And then there's the contents of the first disc, containing Fogelberg's debut Home Free album, which was not a success at the time of its release. Fogelberg and original producer Norbert Putnam remixed the original multi-track tapes from Home Free when it was time to do the CD release, and issued what was, in effect, a somewhat different album, with instruments shifted around in the mix and alterations in the framing and conceptions of various songs.