Born November 27, 1953 in Wausaukee, Wisconsin, Mays is best known for his nearly 25-years behind a battery of keyboards in the innovative, internationally popular Pat Metheny Group. With the guitarist/composer, Mays has co-written much of the consistently engaging music for the multi-Grammy-winning group's ten albums. His rhapsodic, technically impeccable work has also been heard with his close friend on their exceptional duo album As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls (1980), as well as on the soundtrack to the film The Falcon and the Snowman.
1992 was the year in which Mays had last recorded under his own name. In the very fast company of bassist Marc Johnson (a longtime friend and sometime bandmate, going back to their student days at North Texas State University in Denton, Texas) and drummer Jack DeJohnette, he brought forth the well-received disc Fictionary. (Its predecessors were 1985's Lyle Mays and, from 1988, Street Dreams.)
As was the case with Fictionary, Metheny provided the impetus for Mays to go into the studio on his own — but this time — for the first time — he was entirely alone, as far as the music making went. Metheny and Steve Rodby, his group's bassist, served as producers, as they had on the 1992 collection, with Mays as co-producer. "This was yet another case of Pat talking me into something I didn't want to do," says Mays with a small laugh. "I didn't want to do a solo album, mostly because of the ghosts of all the great solo jazz piano records. I'd pretty much decided I wasn't just a piano player; that's not where I live. But during the last tour of the Pat Metheny Group, in 1997-98, Pat was giving me a solo slot every night. At the end of the tour, he said, 'You should go into the studio.' He's constantly suggesting things I wouldn't have thought of doing, and in the course of thinking about things he'd suggested, I tried to find my own way to do it."
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