Since Drake’s death in 1974—at 26, still a year shy of 27 Club infamy—his estate and assorted labels have released much more of his music than he ever released in his lifetime, like many of that era’s heroes who died so young. Every decade or so, a new collection, like 1994’s Way to Blue or 2004’s Made to Love Magic or 2014’s Tuck Box, offers both another generational introduction to Drake and often some unheard gem, some new testament to his lost gifts; the mystique of Drake remains so strong that Fruit Tree, a box set of his “completed recorded works,” has been reissued three times since 1979. The results have occasionally been awkward, as when producers cut his voice free from a scrapped 1968 recording of “Magic,” sped it up, and put it behind a facelifted string section; it became a hit, yes, but the treacle made Drake sound like the smooth-voiced narrator of a Disney film with a song that is fundamentally about the infinite despair of enduring isolation.

There are, blessedly, no such tricks on The Making. Instead, it takes the opposite approach, presenting these songs in assorted embryonic stages, both before and after Drake incorporated other players. The first six cuts—from Drake’s initial winter 1968 session with Boyd and engineer John Wood, when the singer was 19—are astonishing. Drake’s voice is commanding and confident, unhurried as he waits for the ocean to find its shore during “Time Has Told Me” and perfectly equivocal as he teeters between nostalgia and the future during “Saturday Sun,” recognizing that both entail forsaking the present.

With his guitar galloping in circles and his voice testing the limits of a whisper, this take on “Strange Face” (which later became “’Cello Song”) is as masterful as Drake ever became; unbothered by the cello and percussion that eventually made their way to Five Leaves Left, he uses the open space to glide freely with the melody, finding a warmth that feels like he’s welcoming us to a fireside chat. During a second version recorded six months later, though, Drake withdraws into the song, sighing as he sings as if under the spell of the hash he loved; the unknown ensemble around him mixes string drone and gamelan-like percussion, suggesting alternate psychedelic byways Drake never had the time to explore.

By that point, after all, Drake already had firm ideas about how Five Leaves Left should sound. Not long after that first session with Boyd and Wood, he recorded his early songs with the arranger Kirby on a bulky Grundig reel-to-reel, annotating string parts and flute interlocutions as he went. He is strangely self-effacing and self-assured, telling Kirby he will only release “The Thoughts of Mary Jane” if it “works out nice on a backing point of view”; rising through tape wow, flutter, and hiss, his solo version summons a blissfully stoned afternoon by a stream, in no need of any accompaniment at all.