Pat Metheny announces new solo guitar album MoonDial for July release

Legendary American guitarist-composer Pat Metheny today (27 March) announced the release of his new album, MoonDial, on BMG on 26 July.  MoonDial is purely a solo guitar record with no overdubs, recorded on a custom-built nylon-stringed baritone guitar made for him by renowned luthier Linda Manzer.

Metheny says that what sets MoonDial apart from anything he has done previously is that the album was conceived and recorded, and will be released in the middle of another tour. The guitarist developed a special tuning system that conventional nylon strings are not able to achieve “without breaking or sounding like a banjo,” as Metheny says, and his discovery last fall of a new kind of string made in Argentina that was up to the task opened up the world of possibilities heard on MoonDial.

“Last fall’s tour represented not just the sound and vibe of the Dream Box release, but really was an opportunity for me to look at all the other ways I have released records and done occasional performances in a solo setting across the years,” says Metheny of the new record. “Each one of those solo recordings, and Dream Box as well, are unlike the others. The idea for me is to try to keep coming up with different angles and ways of thinking about music while hopefully keeping a fundamental aesthetic at work in all of it. In other words, to continue the research. [On my most recent tour] I introduced this new instrument and this new sound. At first it was just one tune. Then two. By the time the tour was over, the new nylon-string Baritone guitar could be 20 or 25 minutes of the whole concert.”

The album is available now for pre-order on CD, vinyl and digital formats. The title track, ‘MoonDial’, can be streamed here (see the video below as well)

The choice of repertoire on MoonDial is something like what Metheny recorded on One Quiet Night and What’s It All About: a combination of original tunes inspired by the new instrument and standards for which it is the perfect match. Chick Corea’s ‘You’re Everything’ rubs shoulders with Lennon and McCartney’s ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ and the Matt Dennis standards ‘Angel Eyes’ and ‘Everything Happens to Me’ (combined with Bernstein’s ‘Somewhere’). David Raskin’s ‘My Love and I’, written for the Burt Lancaster western Apache, and the traditional ‘Londonderry Air’ are also covered. Many of Metheny’s originals were written during last fall’s Dream Box tour, as he explored the possibilities of the new setup, but he also revisited his own tune ‘This Belongs to You’, recorded with his Unity Band in 2012. All the material shares a vibe Metheny calls ‘intense contemplation’, with the instrument itself taking centre stage. 

“It is a beautiful, rich and kind of infinite-feeling new world for me,” concludes Metheney.

The full album will be available here. Metheny will embark on a European Dream Box/MoonDial tour beginning in October 2024