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Pat Metheny Covers Beatles and Other Legends on New CD

Grammy-winning guitarist Pat Metheny will release a new album of covers on June 14. The album, titled What’s It All About, comprises the jazz great’s personal interpretations of 10 classic songs, including tracks by The Beatles, Burt Bacharach, Simon & Garfunkel, The Carpenters and more.

Guitar fans will find special interest in Metheny’s sonic choices. He recorded most of the record using an acoustic baritone guitar, with a few notable exceptions. The surf classic, “Pipeline,” is played on an acoustic six-string, and The Beatles’ “And I Love Her” was recorded with a nylon six-string. More exotic, though, is Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence,” which was played on a 42-string (yes, you read that correctly) custom-made “Pikasso” guitar.

“It is a song I have always loved,” Metheny said in a press release. “I am a huge fan of Paul Simon, in general. I had been experimenting with a way to play this piece on the Pikasso for a while. The challenges of keeping everything going on that guitar are significant, and the material needs to lend itself to that axe to make it work. In fact, at the core of that instrument is a six-string guitar that, for years, I have had in the same baritone tuning that I used on One Quiet Night (that is where the bass notes come from). This is one of the few tunes on the record where I stay in one key for the whole tune and the way I have that instrument set up is ideal for that kind of an approach.”

Metheny also talked about the influence of the Fab Four, which inspired him to cover the (mainly) Paul McCartney-penned classic.

“The Beatles were huge for me,” he said. “Without them, I don’t know if I even would have become a musician or a guitar player. When their hits started coming out, I was eight and nine years old and it had a tremendous impact on me. I saw the movie A Hard Day’s Night multiple times when it came out and I always loved that song. It is kind of impossible to imagine doing a record like this without including at least one Beatles song.”

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Brotherly Love: Kings of Leon Members Have Tried to Stab Each Other

Stephen Mitchell considers himself Kings of Leon’s #1 fan. As such, he’s been filming the band for a decade, steadily putting together footage for the upcoming documentary Talihina Sky – about to make its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival. The director recently spoke to Spinner.com about the members’ sometimes violent relationship (three of them are brothers, after all).

“[Nathan and Caleb Followill] have notoriously gone at each other over the years,” he said. “They’ve had knockout – I mean broken shoulders, pulled hair, trying to stab each other. Those two are like twins almost. They’re so close but they’re too close, if that makes sense.”

The movie follows the Kings from their first show in a garage to playing to enormous crowds at giant festivals, following the release of their 2008 breakthrough Only by the Night. Since Mitchell has been to so many of the band’s shows, which one does he think was the best?

“The best show ever was 2008 at Oxygen, just outside of Dublin – Irish people just get [expletive] nuts,” he said. “They’re bonkers! They get so drunk. They sing every word, every background vocal part. They sing the guitar solo parts and they’re going [expletive] nuts!

“The dudes get so fired up with joy, they’re not even mad and they’re punching each other in the face. It’s awesome.”

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