I am very excited about this unveiling.

A few years ago, Robrt Pela suggested we compile a list of all of Cher’s compilation albums for the Cher Scholar site. So we did that. And it was quite a mind trap, I must say. Part of the project was culling out what was NOT a comp, like the three albums you see to the left, little imposter stowaways on the massive freighter of Cher comps.

We’d like to take you on the fantastical journey of our compilizing . So first we will summarize the experience of the toil and trouble.

Robrt: Here’s my postmortem paragraph about being a Cher Comp Wrangler. (Where’s my hazard pay?)

So, first of all, I have to thank you for your enthusiasm for this project. It would have been fair of you to say to me, “I think your desire to obsessively list all the Cher compilations is mad, and I don’t want to be friends with you any more.”

Also, thank you for letting me maniacally copy-edit this list.

So, a couple of things I noticed: One is that there are variations of variations of variations in the Cher Comp World. And also that I didn’t find it much fun tracking down some of this stuff. Like, knowing the difference between the Malaysian reissue of the seventeenth iteration of the Outrageous bootleg and the UK import of the original reissue of Holdin’ Out for Love, (which originated in Denmark as a repackaging of a Cher hits package from Canada) didn’t improve my life.

Here’s another thing: The Cher Comp Universe exploded in 2000, for obvious reasons: “Believe” was a monster, and every label, label subsidiary, and bootlegger wanted to cash in. All those annoying Holdin’ Out for Love comp variations started up around then.

Finally, all the similar comp titles and the variations on cover art made me want to jump off the balcony—and we live on the 14th floor. I mean, all those Golden Greats and Golden Hits and This is Chers were bad enough, but when they started swapping covers with one another, I thought I was going to burst into flames.

Which is pretty much what happened when I discovered that this already-weird Imperial/Casablanca mishmash comp called (of course) All I Really Want to Do has a variation cover that features two photographs of Cher THAT AREN’T REALLY HER.

After that I was like, “I’m done.”

Mary: I do feel your pain. While I was finally setting this all up in HTML I was losing the thread of my existence a little bit.

And as I remember it, you suggested this project and I was all like “I dunno…that seems hard.” And you were like,  “We’re doing this!” And I was like…”Okay. ”

But once we got going, it was a lot of fun (and very funny). I am still surprised it took us so long to complete the project but then I didn’t imagine there would be so many comps, so many details to track and so many life things that would intervene.

Parsing through my own collection was sobering. Why did I buy all these? Then looking for the photos was particularly maddening because many of the titles from different labels were duplicated. These aren’t respectable artifacts summarized on Wikipedia. I thank Discogs Music Marketplace for their very helpful database of details and photos.

The most fun for me was tallying up the statistics and organizing them (why so many German comps? Why do the Germans love “Holdin’ Out for Love” as a title so much? Because they love the song?).

And it’s worth mentioning, a compilation cataloguer’s work is never done. There are still a few comps in here that will need further research and I’m interested to see how streaming comps will evolve.

So without further ado:

The Cher Compilations: The breakdown by year, country, era depicted, hits, oddities, sound quality and our ratings.

Spoiler alert: there are 147.

The Discussion: Robert and I spent an evening talking about the Comp albums, our favorites and what makes us crazy about some of them.