[1][3] In addition, the album captured the band and record producer Gary Usher experimenting with new musical textures, including brass instruments, reverse tape effects and an electronic oscillator.

[18] The Byrds' biographer Johnny Rogan states that Usher's wealth of production experience and love of innovative studio experimentation would prove invaluable as the group entered their most creatively adventurous phase.

[16] Author David N. Howard has also remarked that despite the hodgepodge of styles and genres present on Younger Than Yesterday, Usher's studio expertise gives the album an impressively uniform consistency.

[6] In addition to these two country-tinged songs, Hillman also contributed the LSD-influenced "Thoughts and Words", a metaphysical meditation on human relationships that featured the sitar-like sound of backwards guitar effects.

[10][26] Tim Connors had remarked on his Byrdwatcher website that these four melodic, romantically themed Hillman songs brought to the album elements that had largely been missing from the band's recordings since Clark's departure.

[6] However, Connors has stated that "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star" also suggests certain ironies due to pre-fabricated aspects of the Byrds' own origin, including drummer Michael Clarke having been initially recruited for his good looks, rather than for his musical ability.

[10] Hillman's driving bassline and McGuinn's chiming twelve-string Rickenbacker guitar riff form the core of the song, with the production being rounded off by the sound of screaming teenage fans, which had been recorded at a Byrds' concert in Bournemouth during the band's 1965 English tour.

[6][29] South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela contributed the trumpet solo featured in the song, which represented the first use of brass on a Byrds' recording.

[30] McGuinn and Crosby's songs, written both separately and together, represented an expansion of the jazz influences and psychedelia that had been featured heavily on the band's previous album.

[26] McGuinn explained the inspiration for the song in a 1973 interview with ZigZag magazine: "At the time we wrote it I thought it might be possible to make contact with quasars, but later I found out that they were stars which are imploding at a tremendous velocity.

Crosby's songwriting skills had also developed rapidly, with Fricke citing "Renaissance Fair" (co-written with McGuinn) as an example of his increasingly wistful lyricism and writing style.

[6] Fricke has also praised the instrumental interplay between the "church bell peal" of Crosby and McGuinn's guitars, and Hillman's melodic, loping bass, while describing the song as "a radiant evocation of a medieval festival, and by extension the sensual idealism of the hippie dream".

[32] Another of Crosby's songwriting contributions to the album was the moody, jazz-influenced "Everybody's Been Burned", a somber meditation on the need to find a balance between disillusionment and resolute perseverance in a relationship.

[26] Meanwhile, Crosby insisted upon the inclusion of the contentious track "Mind Gardens", which was disliked by the other band members and derided by McGuinn as having no "rhythm, meter, or rhyme".

"[26] Although "Mind Gardens" is often dismissed by critics and fans for being self-indulgent, Rogan has commented that its raga rock ambiance, symbolic lyrics and attractive backwards guitar effects capture the Byrds at their most creatively ambitious.

[20][26] Crosby also fought to have the song "Why" (co-written with McGuinn) included on the album, despite it having already been issued as the B-side of the band's "Eight Miles High" single, some eleven months earlier.

[26] Author Peter Lavezzoli has remarked that "Why" features verses with a chord structure reminiscent of "(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave" by Martha and the Vandellas and a raga-flavored lead guitar solo inspired by the music of sitarist Ravi Shankar.

[40] The album was preceded by the "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star" single, which was released on January 9, 1967, and reached number 29 on the Billboard Hot 100, but failed to chart in the UK.

[9] Upon release, the album received mostly positive reviews from the music press, with Billboard magazine predicting that "the Byrds will be riding high on the LP charts again with this top rock package.

"[11] Pete Johnson in the Los Angeles Times was more cautious, noting that "the album is a good one, but it would be sad if it served as a monument, marking the end of the Byrds' development.

"[2] In the UK, journalist Penny Valentine, writing in Disc magazine, described the album as a return to form for the Byrds, before declaring that the band were "back where they belong with a sound as fresh as cream and sunflowers".

"[41] Author Peter Buckley attempted to evaluate Younger Than Yesterday's contemporary impact more than 30 years after the fact in his 1999 book The Rough Guide to Rock: "The album had room for everything from Hugh Masekela's trumpet to droning sitar-like riffs, a brew that may've been too rich for the Byrds' rapidly shrinking teen audience, but was perfectly in tune with a new underground following who disdained hit singles but were coming to regard albums as major artistic statements.

Although Younger Than Yesterday was somewhat overlooked by the record-buying public at the time of its release, achieving only moderate chart success as a result, its critical stature has grown substantially over the years.

[1][10] In his 2003 book Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock, Richie Unterberger states that Younger Than Yesterday "was [the Byrds'] best album besides Mr. Tambourine Man, and more progressive in many ways".

[1] Rock critic David Fricke, writing for Rolling Stone magazine in 2007, called Younger Than Yesterday "the Byrds' first mature album, a blend of space-flight twang and electric hoedown infused with the imminent glow of 1967 yet underlined with crackling realism".

"[46] Alan Bisbort, writing in the book Rhino's Psychedelic Trip, described Younger Than Yesterday as "an essential snapshot of an incense-scented, acid-drenched world in motion: a kaleidoscope whose every turn yielded some fantastic window on the age".

[58] The reason for these remixes was explained by Bob Irwin (who produced these re-issues for compact disc) during an interview with ICE magazine in 1996: The first four Byrds albums had sold so well, and the master tapes used so much that they were at least two, if not three generations down from the original.