Sweetheart of the Rodeo

Don’t like them on their home turf, and I don’t like them doing this kind of thing either

I could have known from the title of the album "Sweetheart Of The Rodeo" that I wouldn't be able to do anything with it. I listened to the first three tracks and switched on after a few seconds, so perhaps the Byrds have succeeded in playing country music immersively on this album. All the more reason for me not to enjoy it. You probably have to be Texan and have a lot to do with rodeo to listen to music like this. It annoys me, just like Bavarian folklore, German Schlager and German folky music.
1/5

Listened to this whole thing and couldn’t whistle you a single tune from it. If you’re writing when the Beatles are putting out Sgt Peppers a year before… you’d just give up wouldn’t you? Boring, but not annoying.

The byrds. Why is it always the byrds. Another mid-folk/country album. 2/5.

Cool, but I'd rather just listen to Guthrie, Dylan, and Parsons.

I didn't know the Byrds did country? At least this is my first exposure to them. It's ok, nothing groundbreaking. Endless country crap.

Solid album...really enjoy the move to country rock. 3.5/5

Iv been look warm to a couple of byrds albums on the list, I believe they have far too many albums. This is the worst one yet. Probably due to my dislike of country music.

I guess country fans would like this and it is different to their other albums on the list, therefore just makes 2 stars.

I wasn’t expecting to like this. I thought why not just have a country album by a country band? Why do I need to hear the byrds attempt at country? But they did a solid job. Not every song was great, but they really made a solid country album.

This had an older country feel to it and since I am not really a fan of country, this really wasn't my thing. It wasn't necessarily bad though and there were a few decent songs, I just couldn't get into it. 2/5

Goes into the forbidden realm of country music where it just sounds corny.

How this album can be categorized as rock music is beyond me. This is straight up, old school, twangy as hell, whiny ass country music. It's awful. We need a zero stars.

Good thing I like the Byrds, because my journey now includes 3 of their albums, 2 Gene Clarks, 1 David Crosby, & 1 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

HL: “You Ain’t Going Nowhere”, "You're Still On My Mind", “Hickory Wind”, "Nothing Was Delivered", "Pretty Polly" (bonus track)

It gets a little snoozy at times, which might be because my love of country music is conditional and fickle. I have the Flying Burrito Brothers as well as Gram Parson's solo stuff to see whether this particular strain of country rock gets more interesting.
Sweetheart of the Rodeo is still a pleasant listen overall, but the more albums I hear by the Byrds, the more I feel the 3 stars I gave to Younger than Yesterday was too harsh.

October 12, 2023

Just too country for me. I wish I could get more into it. Plus I blame them for helping birth country rock which has now turned into the worst music around today.

I'd be much more interested in hearing the results of Roger McGuinn's original idea to make a genre spanning double album that started with bluegrass and ended with proto-electronica. That would've been a wild ride. Gram Parsons is cool and all, but I like him better on his own, rather than trying to use The Byrds as the platform for his musical vision.

They went full country here!
I bet Wilco like it.

A good old fashioned snooze of a country music record. Boring and dull with only flashes of fun ideas.

A bad pastiche of some very old music - sounds like someone trying to recreate Johnny Cash or Eagles having only heard them once. Not what I expected from The Byrds, and not as good. Decent enough I guess, but nothing memorable in the whole album.

As an album on its own, it's not all that bad but I can't say I enjoyed it all that much. I do think there are a couple tracks like 'You Got A Reputation' and 'Pretty Polly' that sit in the middle of where the band was and where they were aiming to go, which I found a lot more interesting than the majority of the album.

I get the impression that the album is less on the list for how individually great it is and more for the fact that it was a complete revamp of a widely popular band's sound/genre. There are other examples of bands doing this (Ministry's early albums, Garth Brooks' grunge album under the name Chris Gaines, Eddie Vedders ukulele album to a lesser extent). I can't recall a band that has navigated this transition well and certainly not in the span of a single album. If there was a group that did that, I could see why that transitional album would be here.

Spent the whole album in a state of confusion... The Byrds did a country album?