Chestnut Mare

McGuinn and Jacques Levy wrote it in 1969 for Gene Tryp, an unstaged country-rock musical loosely adapted from Peer Gynt. Six of its 26 songs ended up on (Untitled) and Byrdmaniax. The Byrds recorded it at Columbia in Hollywood in June 1970 with Terry Melcher and Jim Dickson producing, McGuinn on 12-string Rickenbacker and Clarence White on guitar. It appeared on (Untitled) on 14 September 1970 at 5:08.

The single followed on 23 October 1970 with Just a Season on the B-side, in a UK edit of 2:58. It bubbled under in the United States at number 121, and reached number 19 in Britain, their first British Top 20 hit since 1965.

The song was written for a scene in which the hero tries to catch and tame a wild horse, a scene that had a deer in Ibsen's Peer Gynt. The music of the middle section is older than the rest: McGuinn wrote it in the early 1960s while touring South America with the Chad Mitchell Trio. The Byrds expert Tim Connors suggests the story deals in mythic archetypes, with the wild mare embodying untamed nature. The American single used the full album version, while Britain and Europe got an edit that drops the second verse and the middle section, and the same edit went to American radio as a promo.

Live

The band performed it on the television show Beat-Club in 1971 and 1972.

It became a staple of American FM radio in the 1970s and stayed in the live set until the band broke up in 1973. A live version is on Live at Royal Albert Hall 1971.