“This tour is very exciting for me,” says GRAMMY-award winning guitarist and composer Pat Metheny ahead of his performance at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall on Thursday 14 November. “I have never really done anything this extensive in terms of being on a bandstand just by myself. This tour is new territory for me, and I feel really lucky to get all these opportunities to continue the research. It is “solo” but the concert really does reflect a wide range of approaches and concepts of what that term might mean.”

“I have never really thought too much about the stuff around the thing - just the thing,” Metheny says when asked what the most significant change has been in his vast career. “Playing a lot has been the key element for me and I have been really lucky to have the privilege of doing lots of gigs across many years now. That said, I do kind of know how it works in that in order to get the gigs you have to make records and do interviews and things like that. But it is the playing and the research into what makes music do what it does that is my only real concern.”

“I always loved music of all kinds,” he says, recalling his early years growing up in Missouri. “Country music and bluegrass were everywhere, then I heard The Beatles on TV when I was about 10, then my older brother Mike who was an excellent classical trumpet player brought home a Miles Davis record when I was 11 or 12. Somehow that mix kind of sums it up.”

When asked what audience members should be listening out for in the new records, Metheny says: “Whatever my thing is, it has never been easy for folks to talk about, including me. I think that might be a good thing, but I'm not sure. Most of what I am interested in is kind of subtle - things about phrasing and touch and in particular a certain quality of improvisation. And maybe the most

elusive thing of all in music is melody. It is the one aspect of things that is almost impossible to dissect and quantify. That is an area of intense interest for me. Including the melody that might come from a bunch of trash cans getting knocked down a flight of stairs.”

Metheny will be taking over the Symphony Hall stage with his Dream Box/MoonDial Tour. “The idea is that on this tour I can look at all the different ways I have made solo records over the years.” He adds: “There is quite a range of things, from the first strumming-type stuff on New Chautauqua to Zero Tolerance for Silence to the baritone stuff and all else, plus the obvious conventional guitar stuff that I might come up with.”

“At this point I have done more than a hundred concerts around the world.” The Dream Box/MoonDial Tour aims to be an intimate concert like no other. “It is an evening very unlike any presentation I have been able to offer before and is getting a special kind of reaction.” Playing over a dozen guitars, Metheny offers songs from his past and recent recordings, all given further dimension by the rare storytelling he shares with his audience. “It is a very intimate and personal kind of thing, and people seem to really be enjoying it.”

Don't miss Pat Metheny: Dream Box/MoonDial Tour on Thu 14 Nov at Symphony Hall.

Interview by Lerah Barcenilla, Marketing & Communications Officer