In the liner notes for Tracks, Bruce Springsteen’s new 4-CD box set of rare and unreleased recordings, the singer writes: “My albums became a series of choices, [and] I based my decisions on my creative point of view at the moment—the subject I was trying to focus on, something musical or emotional I was trying to express. This collection [is] an alternate route to some of the destinations I traveled to on my records, an invitation into the studio on the many nights we spent making music in search of the records we presented to you.”

As Springsteen’s words suggest, the creation of music is mysterious and mercurial, subject to the limits of vision and talent, but also subject to whim. If a song doesn’t match the ideal in the creator’s head, a prolific artist might be inclined to chuck it. And then the fans are left to speculate about the album that might’ve been, had their man stuck to his guns. Tracks is full of great music, but it’s less a portrait of who Springsteen has been for the past 25 years than of who he didn’t become.

For example, I like to imagine 1973’s The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle expanded to two discs, including “Bishop Danced,” “Santa Ana,” “Seaside Bar Song,” “Zero and Blind Terry,” and “Thundercrack” (all officially released for the first time here). This album has always been the curio in the Springsteen line, and, for me, it represents a glorious road not taken. The nascent E Street band was essentially playing the “boogie” music of the time (cf. the early Doobie Brothers and Chicago), but its songs were distinguished by Springsteen’s prodigious, ejaculatory lyrics, wherein he detailed a network of heroic young losers. The twin pinnacles of this period are “Sandy” and “Rosalita”—one song gentle and lovely, the other ecstatically desperate, but both marked with a rare feeling of joy.

The E Street Shuffle outtakes almost match those two songs’ peerless quality. “Thundercrack” is a laid-back R&B workout, while “Santa Ana” and “Zero and Blind Terry” are lilting paeans to scruffy small-town legends. The revelation, though, is “Seaside Bar Song,” an organ-and-sax-driven rocker that marks the entry of cars and restless motion into Springsteen’s thematic pantheon. Suddenly, Born to Run doesn’t seem quite so unexpected.

By Born to Run, Springsteen had become a critically acclaimed, commercially viable musician, and that, along with the counsel of rock critic John Landau, led to stylistic changes. My personal opinion is that Landau shut down the side of the Boss that risked looking ridiculous when the singer expressed his boundless passion. Lyrically, Bruce shifted his focus to working men with crushed spirits, and musically, he kept stripping down his music, inspired by Landau’s (and Dave Marsh’s) belief that concise popular songs are superior to ambitious, multi-part suites. What he lost along the way was that expansive sound that marked his star-making performances.

That said, the best music on Tracks can be found on Disc 2, which is almost entirely comprised of the brisk, rockabilly-influenced songs Springsteen cranked out in the heady days leading up to The River. In this roughly two-year period, the E Street Band became a crack unit, letting rollicking tunes drop like gum wrappers out a car window. Springsteen (with Landau’s and Marsh’s help) discovered the early history of rock ’n’ roll, and his band (especially drummer Max Weinberg) was uniquely suited to recreating Eddie Cochran and the Shangri-Las for the waning days of ’70s malaise.

Disc 2 presents a half-dozen songs as good as the ones that made it onto The River (though not necessarily better—The River is practically perfect). “Restless Nights” has an urgent, chewed-fingernails quality; so does the pounding “Roulette,” a live favorite inspired by the meltdown at Three Mile Island. Decidedly more upbeat are “Where the Bands Are” and “Living on the Edge of the World” (featuring lyrics reprised on Nebraska), but even these two songs are by turns choked and wistful, setting happiness and frustration on the same cracked sidewalk.

The second disc of Tracks also features some songs recorded at the E Street Band’s first Born in the USA sessions, wherein the group honed its groove even further. Disc 3 consists almost exclusively of leftovers from Born in the USA (along with some surprisingly exquisite Tunnel of Love outtakes), and it’s here where the limitations of the Landau-inspired brevity become apparent. Reportedly, Springsteen wrote and recorded almost a song a day from late ’82 to early ’84, and the music grew increasingly trivial, lacking in grandeur. By Disc 4—hit-and-miss material from Springsteen’s shaky ’90s—the Boss had lost much of his presence, and the music ranges from over-earnest sociopolitical songs to outright piffle.

I’m not sure how instructive it is to trace Tracks as an outline of one artist’s decline, even though the sequencing (and the virtual absence of historical information) encourages just this sort of understanding. But there are indispensable songs scattered across the second half. How have we lived without the sprawling, lyrical “Frankie,” the achingly tender love ballad “Happy,” or the sweet family tableau “The Wish”? And even though it seems that, especially on Disc 4, every song has the same structure, the combination of Bruce’s unique voice, soft melodies, and fussed-over lyrics is never less than endearing.

With a few exceptions, that is. If I never hear the goofy “Hungry Heart” remake “Man at the Top” again, it’ll be soon enough. Also, the set has conceptual inconsistencies. Why only a few B-sides like “Pink Cadillac,” and not other uncollected but commercially available cuts, such as “Trapped” or “Missing”? Springsteen includes both “Loose Ends” and an alternate take of “Stolen Car” from the scrapped album The Ties That Bind, but he leaves out the alternate “You Can Look” and “Cindy.” Legendary cuts like “The Promise” and “The Fever” are absent, because Springsteen claims he couldn’t find a good take, but he includes the Born to Run outtake “Linda Let Me Be the One,” which is all but ruined by a mumbly Springsteen vocal.

What is Tracks supposed to be? The popular conception of these clearinghouse collections is that the listener should do a little work—pick the olives off his own pizza. I don’t care for that attitude; an album should be a cohesive work of musical art, not a loose assemblage of unrelated tunes. Springsteen agrees, which is why these songs remained in the vaults for so long.

Still, most of this music deserves to be unearthed, if only to document the remarkable power that Springsteen wielded at the turn of the ’80s and the musical directions he explored in the early ’70s. I could speculate about the set that might’ve been, but I’d rather reshape the future in my head than fret over the past. What if Tracks became an Anthology of American Folk Music for a new generation of rootless rockers? The new breed could follow the map that Bruce left only partially charted in his early years, learning the value of ambition and hard work as a way of coping with failure. They could justify Springsteen’s legacy, follow his Tracks, and learn to exceed the limits of their imagination.