CD Reviews

The Byrds

There Is a Season | Sony Legacy

By MATT ASHARE | January 2, 2007

3.0 Stars

Not only has every significant album by the Byrds been reissued in expanded form with bonus tracks, demos, outtakes, and live recordings, but the band many labeled as America’s answer to the Beatles were one of the first to be boxed in the CD era, back in 1990. That four-disc Byrds retrospective is now out of print. Legacy must have had to dig pretty deep to come up with the five previously unreleased recordings that rest among the 99 tracks that cover the four CDs here. And none of them are particularly revealing. There Is a Season does take a wider view of the band in that it includes several folky tracks recorded before Roger McGuinn, Gene Clark, and David Crosby settled on the name the Byrds, as well as a couple of Clark’s songs from a ’73 reunion album. But the heart of the set is the familiar jangly folk-rock everyone associates with the Byrds, as well as the country excursions with Gram Parsons — recordings that laid the groundwork for what’s come to be known as alt-country. No doubt There Is a Season is a fitting complement to the Gram Parsons set released last June, the three-disc The Complete Reprise Sessions. But really, There Is a Season’s bonus DVD, which features a half-hour of classic clips of the band performing live and lip synching their hits, is the only thing here that hardcore Byrds fans won’t already have in their collection. And, ultimately, it’s those hardcore fans who are the real audience for comprehensive box sets like this.

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