byrdsongs, xvi

Wanna have your mind blown in less than two minutes? Renaissance Fair is a delightfully heady piece of classically-infused pop, among the most ambitious songs the Byrds ever did.  The music pulls you in right away. I think that maybe I’m dreaming. Me, too. I can’t tell if this is real, or a hallucinatory reverie, or somewhere between the two. “In between” is actually a good way to describe the music’s basic vibe. Things are in motion, in flux, interstitial, transforming, becoming different somehow.  For a song that’s so light on its feet, the rhythm section is surprisingly heavy, but not in the bloozey sense of heaviness, more just insistent, or prominent, suggesting a point of no return, the breaching of a threshold.  Make no mistake, this is pop of the highest caliber, undermined as such only a little by its conceptual aspirations, and all the more poignant for being a document of a sensibility in decline…