Friday Night Jukebox, Vol. CCXIV--Pat Metheny: Last Train Home

One of the pitfalls, for my wife and youngest son, of me writing a weekly post about a particular song is that I listen to said song several times before writing the post and usually have the song running through my head most of that week--and I'm one of those people who if he's got a song in his head, he's gonna be singing it.  Only this week, it's an instrumental...so I've spent the last few days just humming the hell out of it...

Pat Metheny grew up in Lee's Summit, Missouri in a musical family.  He saw the Beatles on TV in 1964 and shortly thereafter bought his first guitar.  He discovered Miles Davis and Wes Montgomery over the next couple of years and began to devote himself full time to playing the guitar, specializing in Jazz.  He first appeared on a record (Jaco Pastorius) in 1974 at the ripe age of 20, and released his first album in 1976.  Since then, he's released 46 (you read that right, 46) more LPs, had three of them go gold, had a number of #1 albums on the Jazz charts, and won 20 Grammys.  Metheny is the only artist in the history of the Grammys to win in ten different categories.  He's also appeared on numerous recordings by other Jazz artists as well as quite a few pop ones (James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Hornsby, to name a few).  Metheny has toured the world over, has many guitarist of the year nods from numerous guitar magazines, and been elected into the Missouri Music Hall of Fame. 

Fun Fact:  Metheny plays a custom made Pikasso 1-which is a forty-two string guitar.  It was made by master Canadian luthier (fancy term for guitar maker) Linda Manzer...and how many of you were expecting the Canadian master to be a man?

In something of an oddity in what used to be a pop-centric music culture, "Last Train Home" was released as a single in 1987 (with a video, which is what led me to the song on another in a long line of late night VH-1 viewings).  Unfortunately it never cracked the Billboard Hot 100.  The album it was released on, Still Life (Talking), was the first of Metheny's career to go gold.

In an effort to keep my coolness quotient well below freezing, I'll have to admit that I've never been much of a Jazz fan--for whatever reason it's just never captured my fancy.  But as in every other genre of music, whether a fan or not, every now and again one finds a diamond in the rough--and "Last Train Home" is just such a gem.  It's a bit hard to write about an instrumental--obviously I can note Metheny's guitar playing, and there's Lyle Mays piano, or the wordless backing vocals.  In the end, though, what really makes the song great is the fact that it sounds like the last train home.  And it's not just the chugging sound Paul Wertico elicits from his drums and cymbals--there's a resignation to it, to a time when not everyone owned a car and would take a train home at the end of the day and stare blankly into the scenery as it passed with one's briefcase an arm's length away.  Or at least as I imagine it might--I've never ridden a train in my life, other than the kiddie one at the zoo.  Anyhoo, it's a lovely piece of music that I'll be hum, hum, humming for the next few days.

Lyric Sheet:  Not happening...unless you count the "yea-ahs" in the thirty seconds or so of wordless backing vocals.

Enjoy:

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