The room › Artists › Pat Metheny
Where to start with Pat Metheny
Start with Bright Size Life — Bright Size Life, 1976. That is the track sitting closest to the centre of all 17 Pat Metheny tracks in Zubissou Sounds — a listening room of 14,971 tracks placed one at a time by hand, not an algorithm.
This page is not a discography and not a ranking. It describes exactly one thing: the 17 Pat Metheny tracks that one person put in one room, and where they sit relative to each other. The starting point above is chosen by a rule you can check — of the 17 tracks, it is the one nearest the average position on the four knobs the room runs on, and where two sit equally close the one on a named record wins. Nothing here calls any record better than any other.
The collection leans hard on one record: 8 of the 17 tracks come from Bright Size Life alone.
The years need a caveat: 8 of 9 dated tracks land in the 1970s and come from 1 record, while the rest come from elsewhere — the mark of a reissue carrying its own date rather than the music's. Read the year column below as the date on the copy in this room, not the date the music arrived in the world.
The density knob swings 65 points across these tracks, the widest of the four — it is the axis this artist actually travels along in this room.
Three ways in
The one track, if you only play one
Bright Size Life — Bright Size Life, 1976. Of the 16 Pat Metheny tracks here that have actually been listened to, this one sits closest to the average of them across the four knobs the room runs on. The other 1 arrived carrying the default for their genre, and averaging a placeholder in would move the centre towards nothing. It is the least surprising thing among the tracks that were read, which is what an entry point should be.
If you want the sparse end
Unity Village — Bright Size Life, 1976. The lowest density reading of any Pat Metheny track in the room (3 out of 100). This is as far towards sparse as the collection goes.
If you want the wall end
Mastema (Zorn) — Tap: Book of Angels Volume 20. The highest density reading here, at 68 out of 100 — a 65-point swing across the collection towards wall.
Where Pat Metheny sits in the room
Zubissou Sounds does not have playlists or genres you click. It has knobs. Every track carries a position on each one, set by hand when the track was added, and you find music by setting the room to a state rather than by searching for a name. These are Pat Metheny's average coordinates and the range they cover.
| Knob | Average | Range | Low → high |
|---|---|---|---|
| mood | 46 | 9–68 | melancholy → euphoric |
| energy | 43 | 7–65 | ambient → driving |
| density | 38 | 3–68 | sparse → wall |
| head · body | 44 | 28–60 | cerebral → groove |
All four run 0–100. They are placed by a person, not derived from audio analysis or from any streaming service's feature data.
What is here, record by record
| Album | Year | Tracks |
|---|---|---|
| Bright Size Life | 1976 | 8 |
| Side-Eye III+ | — | 2 |
| Don't Look Down | — | 1 |
| In On It | — | 1 |
| 80/81 | — | 1 |
| Watercolors | — | 1 |
| Steve Reich: Different Trains / Electric Counterpoint | — | 1 |
| Tap: Book of Angels Volume 20 | — | 1 |
| As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls | 1981 | 1 |
Every Pat Metheny track in the room
| Track | Album | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Bright Size Life | Bright Size Life | 1976 |
| Midwestern Nights Dream | Bright Size Life | 1976 |
| Missouri Uncompromised | Bright Size Life | 1976 |
| Omaha Celebration | Bright Size Life | 1976 |
| Round Trip / Broadway Blues | Bright Size Life | 1976 |
| Sirabhorn | Bright Size Life | 1976 |
| Unity Village | Bright Size Life | 1976 |
| Unquity Road | Bright Size Life | 1976 |
| As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls | As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls | 1981 |
| 1st of Two Folk Songs | 80/81 | — |
| Don't Look Down | Don't Look Down | — |
| In On It | In On It | — |
| Make A New World | Side-Eye III+ | — |
| Urban and Western | Side-Eye III+ | — |
| Electric Counterpoint (Reich) | Steve Reich: Different Trains / Electric Counterpoint | — |
| Mastema (Zorn) | Tap: Book of Angels Volume 20 | — |
| Icefire | Watercolors | — |
Near neighbours in this room
These are the artists whose average knob position sits nearest to Pat Metheny's in this room. It is a coordinate match, not a claim that they sound alike.
- Where to start with Keith Jarrett — jazz, 13 tracks
- Where to start with Thelonious Monk — jazz, 23 tracks
- Where to start with Ahmad Jamal — jazz, 28 tracks
What the open databases say
MusicBrainz lists Pat Metheny as a solo artist, from the United States and born in 1954. Its contributors tag the artist jazz, guitar, jazz fusion, contemporary jazz and jazz and blues. These are the open database's facts, not mine — you can check them against the MusicBrainz entry.
Questions
How many Pat Metheny tracks are in Zubissou Sounds?
There are 17, across 9 albums. 9 of them carry a date, running from 1976 to 1981. That is the whole of what this room holds — it is one person's collection, not a discography.
Is this a best-of, or a ranking?
No. Nothing here is ranked and no track is called better than another. The starting point is picked by arithmetic — the track closest to the centre of all the others on four measured axes — and the rule is printed above so you can disagree with it.
Where do the knob numbers come from?
They are set by hand, one track at a time, by the person who added the track. They are not audio analysis and not a Spotify feature. Mood, energy, density and the head/body balance each run 0 to 100. 16 of these 17 tracks have been read that way. The other 1 arrived with the default for their genre and nobody has listened to them yet, so they are left out of the centre, the ends and the spread quoted above.
Can I listen to these here?
Not yet from this page. Zubissou Sounds is in private beta — the room itself plays through Spotify, and 17 of these 17 tracks are matched to a Spotify ID and ready to play the moment you are in. The waitlist form is at the bottom of this page.