| Experience the Divine: Greatest Hits | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 US edition | ||||
| Greatest hits album by | ||||
| Released | June 22, 1993 1996 (re-release) | |||
| Genre | Vocal | |||
| Length | 51:35 66:27 (re-release) | |||
| Label | Atlantic | |||
| Bette Midler chronology | ||||
| ||||
| Alternative cover | ||||
.jpg) International edition | ||||
| Review scores | |
|---|---|
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   [1] |
| Robert Christgau |  [2] |
| Entertainment Weekly | B−[3] |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide |  [4] |
Experience the Divine: Greatest Hits is a compilation album by American singer Bette Midler, featuring many of her best-known songs. The fourteen track compilation was released on Atlantic Records in 1993.
While several greatest hits albums with Midler had been released in the UK, Continental Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand and Japan throughout the 1970s and 1980s, such as The Best of Bette (1978) and The Best of Bette (1981)—two different compilations with the same title—and Just Hits (1987), this was the first career overview to be released worldwide including the US and Canada, some twenty years after Midler recorded her first studio album for the Atlantic Records label. The album included one new recording, Midler's Emmy Award-winning rendition of "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)", sung to retiring talk show host Johnny Carson on the penultimate Tonight Show in May 1992. Experience the Divine: Greatest Hits peaked at #50 on the Billboard 200 albums chart in 1993 and was three years later certified platinum for one million copies sold in the US.
Experience the Divine: Greatest Hits was re-released in Europe, Australia and New Zealand in 1996 with a slightly altered track list, then also including two of Midler's biggest hits which for some reason had been left off the 1993 edition; "Favorite Waste of Time" and the Rolling Stones cover "Beast of Burden", both from the 1983 album No Frills. The 1996 edition also included two versions of the US hit single "To Deserve You", taken from what became Midler's final studio album for Atlantic, 1995's Bette of Roses.
- ^ Experience the Divine: Greatest Hits at AllMusic
- ^ Christgau, Robert. "Robert Christgau: CG: Bette Midler". robertchristgau.com. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
- ^ Woodard, Josef (30 July 1993). "Experience the Divine". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved 1 April 2022.
- ^ Coleman, Marc; Brackett, Nathan (2004). "Bette Midler". In Brackett, Nathan; Christian, Hoard (eds.). The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (4th ed.). New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 540. ISBN 0-7432-0169-8.