Fleetwood Mac has two distinctive career periods - the blues years in the late 60s, and the pop/rock years that soon dominated the chart and radio wave. The best materials of the latter years were excellently summerized in Reprise's 2002 'Very Best of', which packed with chart hits and radio favourites. But the good collection of their early blues years were really hard to find on the market. 1969's 'Pious Bird of Good Omen' was a good collection but it ran a little bit too short, with only 12 songs, and curious fans may found the boxset was too large of a purchase.

But in June 2007, Sony released 'The Essential Fleetwood Mac' as one of their 'Essential' series. This 2-CD album collected 32 songs from their first 3 albums with Peter Green ('Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac', 'Mr. Wonderful', and 'English Rose'), which included almost every tracks from each albums - including "Albatross", "Black Magic Woman", "I Believe My Time Ain't Long", and "Need Your Love So Bad". However, this album failed to become a definitive ablum of Peter Green's era. Unbelievably, the producer managed to exclued the materials from 1969's 'Then Play On', which was Green's last album with the band and produced the mid chart singles "Oh Well". It also would be nice if the songs on the album were sequenced chronically instead of jumbled all over the place. But since the early albums are hard to find on the market, this 'Essential' collection is a good purchase to wrap almost everything on the first three albums into one concise place.