Pat Metheny – MoonDial

MoonDial is a companion to Metheny’s last album, Dream Box. Per Meheny’s website:

“With the release of Dream Box in the spring of 2023, I took off on a long solo tour around the world, sitting alone onstage for two and a half hours for the very first time. I had played a few tunes here and there by myself each night for years but had never built a presentation that focused solely on solo guitar playing for such an extended run of concerts.“

While on tour, Metheny acquired a new baritone guitar from luthier Linda Manzer, but he commissioned it with nylon strings vs steel like his other baritones. There were challenges with the new instrument – again, from Metheny’s website:

“My deep dive into the world of Baritone guitar began when I remembered that as a kid in Missouri, a neighbor had shown me a unique way of stringing where the middle two strings are tuned up an octave while the general tuning of the Baritone instrument remains down a 4th or a 5th. This opened up a dimension of harmony that had been previously unavailable to me on any conventional guitar.

There were never really issues with Linda’s guitar itself, but finding nylon strings that could manage that tuning without a) breaking or b) sounding like a banjo – was difficult.

Just before we hit the road, I ran across a company in Argentina (Magma) that specialized in making a new kind of nylon string with a tension that allowed precisely the sound I needed to make Linda’s Baritone guitar viable in my special tuning.

There was suddenly a whole new palette of sound under my fingers, just like that.”

Metheny began introducing his new instrument on the Dream Box tour, and soon, he had an album’s worth of material. During a tour break in December 2023, he recorded MoonDial.

The songs mix originals and covers (Corea, Lennon & McCartney, Bernstein & Sondheim, Mercerr, jazz standards, and traditional folk music). The music is mellow, quiet, and acoustic, or as Metheny puts it:

“This record might offer something to the insomniacs and all-night folks looking for the same sounds, harmonies, spirits, and melodies that I was in pursuit of during the late nights and early mornings that this music was recorded.”

There were a lot of clear nights during that December, and in my imagination, it seemed like the moon was checking out what I was searching for up on the upstate NY mountain where I was recording.“

I prefer Metheny’s ensemble work, but this music has its place. It is excellent background music without being musical wallpaper. One of the appeals to Metheny’s music, beyond his brilliant sense of melody, is his guitar tone. Nothing is better than Metheny discovering a new toy, like when he found the Roland guitar synth in the late 70s/early 80s. He takes these new instruments and makes them sing in his singular voice. Manzer’s baritone guitar and Magma strings are Metheny’s latest muse, and MoonDial is the beautiful result. The baritone guitar has a unique tone: rich and thick like an electric hollow body guitar, but clearly acoustic. It has a deep bass and lots of overtones. It often sounds like two guitars or overdubs, but it is Methany playing solo. It is a pretty great sound.

I am consuming the album via a high-resolution Tidal stream (24-bit/96 kHz FLAC). The album is also available in Atmos format on Tidal, but I don’t have the proper equipment to listen to that format. Typically, I would buy the vinyl, but given how quiet this album is, I can’t imagine how vinyl surface noise would improve the listening experience.