Pat Metheny
Dream Box

Why Dream Box? What’s in this dream box?

Over the years, during endless world tours, in hotel rooms where Pat spent long nights, often sleepless, sometimes without even remembering where he was, he would pick up the guitar and strum, his fingers following the flow of emotions, stained with nostalgia, memories, recurrences, styles, comforting and disheartening loops of notes, fragments.

He presented it like this: sparse tracks roughly recorded on his laptop, almost all nocturnal stuff, internal, incomplete, drafts or doodles, flashes, reminiscences, sudden inspirations, more for company than for composing, revisited and adapted, prepared for recording. Every good idea he decided to turn into a piece. Ten came out. Dream Box came out.

The first impression upon listening is almost disheartening, it feels like following an old man who, bored, moves his fingers randomly on the strings waiting for something sensible to come out. It's saddening to think of the glories of the past, the distant fusion mixtures, the Group's experiments, the contaminations, the alchemies with the great and the less great, the vibrant percussions. Another solo album, one might say, not exciting just as “One Quiet Night” wasn't. It seems he wasn't too eager to exert himself, that he rummaged through the trash bin of ideas. Or maybe not?

If you know Pat, you will find him again. Maybe not immediately, but you will find him. In his immensity. The purest Pat ever heard, retracing himself and elevating it to the nth degree. It had been since "The Way Up" that so much substance hadn't been felt. The melodic keys of the tracks are not immediate, but they come, they break in two, they open the heart, they take you on a round-trip journey of forty years, yet it’s all so simple, clean, harmonic. Anything but a series of “casts-offs” or reassembled fragments.

Impressive, at least to me, who has always followed Pat, how this work wins you over note by note. Tracks like PC of Belgium or Ole & Gard have an imposing and delicious structure, Never was Love and I Fall in Love Too Easily stand out for their refined delicacy. And at this point comes the smile, you even think he couldn’t have done better, that the time for experiments and the inclusion of young and virtuosic, but a bit unripe musicians, is fortunately over (indeed, it hadn’t gone very well in the last works) and that dear Lyle Mays will not return anymore, but the soul of a great one is still there, alive and very powerful, expressed with superb grace.