1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 82. The Byrds – Younger Than Yesterday (1967)

I’m currently in a chunk of albums where I just made some brief notes during/after listening to them. After Sergeant Pepper I go back to making longer write-ups, because for a lot of these I really can’t recall the music and have had to listen again to say something more substantial. Take this album, for example. My notes simply read “Not as interesting as the last Byrds album, definitely can tell the Crosby parts though”.

That’s it.

So back I go to listen again, because surely there’s more to say about the album than that (even though Dimery seems to really have a thing about The Byrds).

The opening track is So You Want To Be A Rock And Rolls Star, built around a driving repetitive phrase, slightly contrapuntal, decorated with mariachi horns and the sounds of screaming fans. There’s a drift towards their future country direction in the honky-tonk Time Between, but many of the other tracks (e.g Have You Seen Her Face) are very much in the jingle-jangle Byrds style of the previous album. Everybody’s Been Burned features some raga-style guitar soloing prefiguring Eight Miles High, so the whole thing sounds a little bit like all of the eras of The Byrds combined.

Is it worthy of inclusion in the 1001 Albums list? It doesn’t feel notable enough in my opinion, although it’s pleasant enough. Amid all the rest of the Haight-Ashbury type stuff, it gets a bit lost.