Pat Metheny Group: Speaking of Now: Writing

The writing team of Metheny and Mays geared up in early May, 2001. Says Metheny; "The writing process for the PMG's music has been actually quite varied from record to record over the years, but i am positive that these particular writing sessions will be remembered by both Lyle and myself for many years to come. It was just a pleasure to come in to work together each day. As we were working on the music, we never left the room from each other to work separately on a section or a melody or something during the entire writing period. It just never came up that we ever needed to do that this time, not even once. That has never happened before in any of our previous collaborations. This record includes some of the most fully co-written music we have ever come up with. For three weeks, the stuff just poured out. I had a batch of ideas that i had been gathering for a while and we would just kind of dig into this big pile of candidates, Lyle had a couple of possibilities that he brought in as well, pull one of the more likely ones out and start asking questions of it. Each day we would either walk out with a finished piece or come in the next morning and wrap it up. Every day it was like this. We basically never hit any snags, we both had tons of ideas and as we went along and as it became clear that we were going to have Richard and Cuong to write for, we got even more inspired -- their specific sounds and talents focused the general direction that the pieces were evolving towards even more clearly. We knew that with Steve and Antonio, basically any kind of a groove was possible. We wound up with more than enough for a record, and I felt like we could have kept going and going. We basically stopped because it was time to go across the street and start recording! We have so many ideas in reserve now that we didn't even get to this time - I almost can't wait to get started on the next one already."