Tuesday, March 4, 2008

About This Site

I'm a big Springsteen fan. Part of what attracted me to his music is how he summarizes American music through his own records and the songs he chooses to cover. Recently I started collecting original 45rpm records of the songs Springsteen performed live through out his career. There are hundreds of them, so I expect to be busy for quite a while. I decided to turn this quest into a blog and share my findings with you.

On this blog you'll find a couple of features to keep you entertained. I'll run them by you here so you'll know what to expect.

Boss Tracks
The central feature of this site. Every 45 I find will get reviewed here. I'll try to find as many obscure to well known details on each and every one of them. You'll be able to listen to them while you read through the nifty little flash players included on the bottom of the page.

The mp3s I use for the flash player are encoded in low quality. There are a few reasons for that. First and foremost, I want to encourage people to go out and buy CDs of the artists I review here. Quite a few have been forgotten by time and it would be nice if they get a few sales in again. The second reason is practical, limitations on my storage space at Hip Cast. I will leave the mp3s up for a limited amount of time for the same reasons.

MP3 files are posted here strictly for the purpose of music criticism and comparison and therefore fall under the "fair use" guidelines of U.S. copyright law. If you find any material here on Boss Tracks that you feel violates your intellectual property be free to contact me at soulboogiealex@gmail.com.This will be a labor of love and it is not my intention of stepping on any body's toes here.

Boot Tracker
A feature that quickly absorbed most of my time with the current tour running. Here I will review current bootleg releases. Since a mother load of bootlegs is made available through Jungleland these days I won't be reviewing all of them. The focus is on the running tour and new releases by Ev2 and Fanatic records.

I provide a link to an mp3 source for the bootlegs for those who are unable to do torrents or store big files on prehistoric computers. I have one request though, keep those mp3 files for private use only. Never burn them to give away or for a trade. Mp3 files deteriorate rapidly each time they are ripped from a CD. To keep the trading pool healthy it is essential that mp3 based CDs aren't distributed any further than your own living room.

Down the Tracks
Because I like to keep the blog a little elective I will use this feature to review material that's not Springsteen. I will try to keep a link to the Boss, but I might indulge myself here from time to time. This feature is intended for new albums, books, films and occasional features on other artists.

On the Tracks
This feature is open to other fans. I would like to use this section for fan reviews of shows or a place where fans can share special stories. If you want to contribute, drop me an email!

Enjoy your stay.