Pat Metheny: Stories beyond Words

This is the most recent serious book about Pat’s music, and the one that lines up most closely with what this site has been writing about since 2004. Bob Gluck built it on new interviews with Pat and his bandmates. As the title suggests, his subject is storytelling: how instrumental music can carry a narrative without words.

Gluck spends real time on the Pat Metheny Group’s sound and on The Way Up. That makes it the natural companion to two pieces on this site. One is the review of The Way Up’s opening night in Lancaster in February 2005, when the piece was brand new and still settling. The other is the formal analysis, which looks at the stacked, overlapping meters about twelve minutes into Part One. A long-form work like The Way Up raises exactly the question this book asks: how do you hold a listener through a single piece the length of an album, with no lyrics and few conventional song boundaries? The site’s answer is structural. Gluck’s comes through narrative and the musicians’ own accounts, and the two approaches complement each other.

At 192 pages, it’s readable for listeners who don’t read music. Players and students will still find plenty to argue with. If The Way Up is your favorite Pat Metheny Group record, or the one you’ve never quite figured out, start here.