WHITESNAKE founder and lead singer David Coverdale had 16 tracks remixed and remastered for this collection, including "Is This Love", which was a hit, reaching No. 9 on the U.K. singles chart and No. 2 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. "Is This Love" was WHITESNAKE's second-biggest U.S. hit after "Here I Go Again", which topped the charts.

 

Asked if there was any trepidation about how the WHITESNAKE rock audience would accept such a radio friendly ballad, Coverdale said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET):

"Slightly, yeah. The original idea was for Tina Turner. My friends and associates at EMI Records were looking for songs to follow up Tina's astonishing story. The album with 'What's Love Got To Do With It' was huge, global, and they were looking for songs. And they knew I was going away to do the old correlation of song ideas and said, 'If you come up with anything that you think might be good for Tina' — 'cause they knew I was a huge fan — let us know. So that was the idea — the original idea for 'Is This Love' was for Tina."

 

Regarding how the song came together, David said: "[Then-WHITESNAKE guitarist] John Sykes and I… I rented a villa in the south of France, and John and I had different hours. He had owl hours and I had daytime hours. He'd sort of stagger out of his room to get coffee as I was tinkering away and turning the volume up about four in the afternoon. And he said, 'Oh, what's that? That's nice.' I said, 'Oh, it's not for us. It's for Tina Turner.' Anyway, he gets his coffee, sits down and starts playing these… It was just this organic thing. These ideas just fed really beautiful things that I wouldn't have come up with. Maybe John wouldn't have come up with the chords, but the embellishments were just part of the whole package of the song. And when [WHITESNAKE's then-record label] Geffen heard it, I said, 'No, no, no. This is for Tina Turner.' [And they said,] 'No, it's not.' And it's one of the biggest songs that we have.

 

"Whenever we play really big heavy metal festivals around the world, I'm going, 'Should we do it?' Man, everybody's hugging, 'cause usually by that time of the day, people need a good sonic hug. So we're only too happy to oblige with that.

 

"Sorry, Tina," Coverdale added. "I would still love to have heard her sing it, though. If you were to imagine it in your mind's ear, you know she'd do a superb job on it."