I'm glad Neil didn't erase the recordings. Sometimes bands have gems that stay in the vault for a long time. I remember reading about Nirvana's "You know you're right" years before it was released. I still remember the excitement I felt when it turned out the recording was real. Audioslave is another band that apparently has some good stuff in their vault. What was going to be the first single off of Revelations was…
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 h…
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.