When Peter Gabriel first released Shaking the Tree: Sixteen Golden Greats, he was about four years into his career as a solo artist. That made this one of the earliest releases from him, and it also marked a major transition for the English rocker.

As a greatest hits album, it's a surprisingly good set of tracks, including many that were already available on singles (the re-recording of "Here Comes the Flood" is especially effective). Its best track was the title cut, which had a pretty decent sounding video to boot.

The big gimmick here is that the album's best tracks aren't even Gabriel's own; they're from his collaboration with Robert Fripp, the latter of whom would later produce the aforementioned Shaking The Tree.

Most of the rest are straight up re-recorded singles from Gabriel's time with Genesis, including the aforementioned title cut and the appropriately named "In Your Eyes." The best of the bunch is the aptly titled "Jesus to a Child," which sounds like something that could be from an old Duran Duran album. The song is a minor gimmick in terms of musical performance, but it's an impressive one for the amount of detail it contains, and has long been used as a jingle on commercials and as a theme for many TV shows.

Shaking the Tree is a good example of a well thought out and executed piece of music, and it's a fun reminder of how much the musician's mind can be stretched when given the freedom to explore. It also demonstrates that, for all his pyrotechnics, Peter Gabriel is still very much in the same class as other musicians of his ilk.