It’s tempting to call Side-Eye III+, the first full-band album from Pat Metheny in five years, a return to form, but that would inevitably lead to the question: Which form? Over his more than five decades in music, the guitar virtuoso has pioneered, explored, and refined dozens of styles, while forging an unmistakable personal sound. With the Pat Metheny Group, he fashioned an emotive and approachable blend of streamlined jazz, flexible heartland rock, and eclectic international accents on albums like American Garage (1979) and Letter From Home (1989), later moving into trip hop and modernist prog on Imaginary Day (1997) and The Way Up (2005). He’s unleashed blazing avant-garde rippers with collaborators such as Ornette Coleman and Derek Bailey, made an album with a suite of computer-controlled instruments, and backed Joni Mitchell and David Bowie. That glittering, snake-hipped guitar line on the Orb’s EDM classic “Little Fluffy Clouds”? That’s a sample of Metheny playing a composition by minimalist titan Steve Reich.
But it’s hard to deny that Metheny’s latest venture, the debut release of his own label imprint, Uniquity Music, marks a change from the mellow solo ruminations of his past two albums, Dream Box (2023) and MoonDial (2024), and even from the first Side-Eye record, which was recorded live and featured a few previously recorded tunes. III+ is very much a studio affair, with a big, robust sound, ambitious new songs, and an array of extra musicians and singers.
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“I kind of joke that there are two kinds of records that I make: “documentary” type records—a few folks in a studio, play the tune a few times, pick the best one and move on—and then what I kind of jokingly call the ‘Stephen Spielberg IMAX’ type records, meaning they are records where the studio itself plays a role as an instrument in things beyond just the basics,” Metheny says. And then there are a bunch of records that kind of fall in the middle as hybrids of those two. This would be one like that.”
Side-Eye III+ undoubtedly has a panoramic sweep. Long, elaborate tracks like “Don’t Look Down” and “Risk and Reward” feature splashy choral vocals (courtesy Mark Kibble of Take 6), glimmering harp and sinuous auxiliary percussion, populating Metheny’s wide horizons with vibrant vistas. “Urban and Western” begins as a genteel front-porch blues but erupts into a full-blown gospel extravaganza. It might be the biggest leap Metheny has taken in recent memory, and he lands it with characteristic aplomb.
“This record and the previous large-scale record (2020’s From This Place) have some similarities in that I had a fantastic group that had played, in both cases, hundreds of concerts together. I wrote a bunch of music just for them, and then while in progress, realized that while the core of it was correct, the material kept me up at night seeming to be asking for more beyond just a quartet or trio record, even though I had written both records to be exactly that,” Metheny says.
And Side-Eye III+, despite its expansive palette, does retain some of the tart muscularity of small-group live performance. Album opener “In On It” begins like a classic mid-’80s PMG banger, with hard-charging drums (from Side-Eye veteran Joe Dyson), an insistent, twitchy central riff and almost hyperactive chord changes. “Make a New World” has a gentler cadence and a slower tempo, but it remains tightly focused on Metheny’s signature off-center warmth. But these tracks also transform, with sudden shifts in rhythm and tone, dynamic beat drops and harmonic layers pushing them into new territory.
“The original idea of Side-Eye … was sort of a ’21st century organ trio,’ meaning left-hand bass in the keyboard department, and [Side-Eye keyboardist] Chris Fishman is one of the best guys I have ever heard at doing that. But pretty early on, I realized that this music would at least benefit from a bass player, and then I started hearing harp stuff, then singers, then percussion, and realized this record was going to be the core band of Chris, Joe, and I—plus,” Metheny says.
Though the material on Side-Eye III+ may have been written for Metheny’s current group, it feels like it’s in conversation with the guitarist’s younger sounds. Yearning guitar-synth lines floating through cushions of keys evoke PMG’s ’80s heyday, while largely acoustic numbers like “Our Old Street” and album closer “So Far, So Good” have the elliptical melancholy that made “Last Train Home,” from 1987’s Still Life (Talking), such a haunting soundtrack to a long-running Florida grocery store holiday commercial. According to Metheny, some of that depth comes from the extra personnel, including singer and percussionist Leonard Patton, who Metheny says he’d wanted to work with “for a while now.”
“So, this line-up kind of mirrors not just the recent Side-Eye record but other bands I have had over the years,” he says.
Some of the eerily wistful undertones may also spring from Metheny’s longtime presence on the scene. “There is an unexpected side effect of sticking around for lots of years in that younger musicians have absorbed my records and band conception and the tunes in pretty complete ways, to the point that I hardly have to make suggestions to folks on any instrument as to the way a tune might be treated. From listening a lot to the stuff, they just sort of know the vocabulary of it now, even if it is just by osmosis,” Metheny says.
Metheny, though still going hard at 71, feels the passage of time in less welcoming ways, as well, perhaps another reason for the reflective tone of Side-Eye III+. ” I look at my records, and a growing number of folks who are on them are no longer on the planet. … Many of these incredible musicians who I had fantastic musical relationships with also became lifelong close friends. [Recently passed drum legend] Jack [DeJohnette] was my next-door neighbor for more than 40 years. Charlie Haden was my best friend in life. Same with Mike Brecker. Dewey Redman, Ornette, Billy Higgins. All of them were at least as important to me as friends than as master musicians. I feel so lucky about that. In the end, for me the musical aspect of knowing those folks was almost secondary to just knowing them.”
Metheny has too much restless creativity to ever be sunk by the weight of the past, however. A relentless composer and tireless player, he’s mounting an international tour that will keep him and the Side-Eye on the road through September. And he’s got other irons in the fire. “I have five records either done, in progress, or ready to get going on,” he says. And, on his new label, he’s also planning to rerelease many of his older albums that have gone out of print or never been issued on vinyl. This could be good news for the fans who’ve been itching to get such ’90s masterpieces as Question and Answer and Secret Story on LP.
And even in the thick of all this activity, he still has time to keep abreast of the cultural scene. Asked if he’d heard the discourse-fueling buzz band Geese, Metheny responded: ” Yes. Saw them on ‘SNL’ after having already checked them out a bit. The first tune [“Au Pays du Cocaine”] was OK, but your basic thing—which I guess they were going for ironically. My least-fave approach to music but seems to come up a lot. But I loved the second tune [“Trinidad”]. That was really the kind of thing I dig.”
Ultimately, Metheny seems content with his legacy, but unwilling to rest on his considerable laurels. Of his past milestones, he says: “I don’t think anyone gets lasting credit for moving the vocabulary forward—because actually, that is what we are supposed to all be doing. It is a basic part of our job description.” Luckily for the listeners, deep into his life’s work, Metheny is still serious about his job.
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