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by jtanderson 1821 days ago
I feel this. One of my favorite artists, Ray LaMontagne, has entire albums that he has apparently (due to essentially rumors and, at some point, wikipedia) worked hard to completely remove from the internet. They're from his early days and a little different in terms of his style and voice, but I never found anything definite about the reasoning. However, these albums have some of my absolutely favorite material of his, far more than what you can find on even YouTube now and I was fortunate enough to get some of the tracks digitally years ago and hang onto them. Some of them have even been covered more recently and become pretty popular.
1 comments
cydonian_monk 1821 days ago
So that's what happened to those. I knew I wasn't completely crazy and that I'd heard and/or "bought" some early Ray LaMontagne music, but last year when I was trying to find it the tracks I was thinking of were nowhere to be seen. Just "Trouble."

A guy I knew in high school released seven or eight albums with a co-conspirator and also felt the same way about their early work. Some of it was admittedly a bit rough, but some was also very good. He eventually relented on his opposition to re-leasing any of it, and those early songs have long since made it onto iTunes (and basically every streaming service). So I can definitely understand artists not wanting to see or hear their earliest works, worried that people will hate it and judge them based on who they used to be.

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jacquesm 1821 days ago
It's interesting that there are many different trajectories for musical artists, the ones that this particular narrative most applies to are the ones that become more polished as they get older but whose creative genius was spent in the early years. And there are quite a few of those. Listen to early recordings of 'The Police' and what they - and Sting - put out later for some nice examples of that. The early stuff was definitely rough, but it has so much energy and originality.
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jtanderson 1820 days ago
If you're still looking, drop me a line! Those recordings are, in my ears, solid gold :)
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