These Days

These Days is the eleventh studio album and the first box set by country artist Vince Gill. Consisting of 43 original songs spanning four discs, the album displays the range of Gill’s lyrical and musical styles, ranging from traditional country and bluegrass to jazz and rock. The album was nominated for two Grammy Awards including Album of the Year and won Best Country Album. The album is currently number 10 on People Magazine's "Top 10 Best Albums of the Century (So Far)". It is also ranked #9 on Country Universe's "The 100 Greatest Albums of the Decade." To accompany him on this undertaking, Gill turned both to artists he knew and had worked with before and to those whose music he admired from a distance. "I never try to fill up my records with famous people," Gill says. "I try to fill them up with the most talented people I can find on the face of the earth." By the time the project was completed, that group included Sheryl Crow, Bonnie Raitt, Diana Krall, Rodney Crowell, Patty Loveless, Phil Everly, the Del McCoury Band, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, John Anderson, Lee Ann Womack, Jenny Gill, Amy Grant, LeAnn Rimes, Gretchen Wilson, Guy Clark, Trisha Yearwood, Bekka Bramlett, Michael McDonald, steel-guitarist Buddy Emmons and many other musical standouts. Initially, Gill planned to pare down the songs to a single album. Then, in one of the studios he used, he spotted some Beatles memorabilia and recalled that the Fab Four had routinely released multiple albums within the same year. The album debuted on the U.S. Billboard 200 at number 17, with 42,000 copies sold in its first week. This was also the album's peak position on the chart.[