Top 35 Pat Metheny Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The more I can learn about music, the more I learn about other things.”

— Pat Metheny

2. “Listening is the key to everything good in music.”

— Pat Metheny

3. “Im always trying to find connections between things. That art is the juxtaposition of a lot of things that seem unrelated but add up to something recognizable.”

— Pat Metheny

4. “Music is what you notice when it’s no longer in your presence...”

— Pat Metheny

5. “Jazz demands that you bring to it things that are valuable to you, that are personal to you.”

— Pat Metheny

6. “I was deep in the zone of practicing almost constantly.”

— Pat Metheny

7. “Learning to play is mostly about learning to hear, and learning to really listen deeply to sound in a musical way is a lifetime’s worth of work.”

— Pat Metheny

8. “I think I represent a more left-wing view of what jazz is.”

— Pat Metheny

9. “There’s more bad music in jazz than any other form. Maybe that’s because the audience doesn’t really know what’s happening.”

— Pat Metheny

10. “The best musicians are not the best players, they’re the best listeners.”

— Pat Metheny

11. “My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.”

— Pat Metheny

12. “Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.”

— Pat Metheny

13. “People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a Jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.”

— Pat Metheny

14. “Most guys at Berklee are going to wind up truck drivers...”

— Pat Metheny

15. “The beauty of jazz is that it’s malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.”

— Pat Metheny

16. “If jazz has to be termed as a wave, then music is a sea, but if the reflectors in the water is the chord.”

— Pat Metheny

17. “Its more about conception and touch and spirit and soul than whether my hardware was in place.”

— Pat Metheny

18. “From 1962 to 1965, the guitar became this icon of youth culture, thanks mostly to the Beatles.”

— Pat Metheny

19. “If you plan on continuing a tradition, it might be a good idea to find out just what tradition it is that you intend to continue.”

— Pat Metheny

20. “The Unity Band project has been life-changing for me. I have led many groups of talented musicians, but this is unlike anything else.”

— Pat Metheny

21. “I just have never seen anyone build anything significant in any field without having a deep and detailed sense of what they are building on.”

— Pat Metheny

22. “I don’t worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about Jazz.”

— Pat Metheny

23. “I saw A Hard Day’s Night 12 or 13 times.”

— Pat Metheny

24. “I try to be prepared for the moment, through understanding, and being warmed up, knowing all about chords and scales, so I don’t even have to think and I can get right to what it is I want to say.”

— Pat Metheny

25. “My older brother Mike is an excellent trumpet player. By the time he was 12, he was playing around Kansas City in classical situations. He was already an amazing talent.”

— Pat Metheny

26. “Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.”

— Pat Metheny

27. “I think I have a basic sound aesthetic that is in most of what I do.”

— Pat Metheny

28. “Players get to that intermediate level where they can already play pretty good, and that’s kind of a dangerous period because they tend to start playing only the things that they can play, rather than the things they can’t.”

— Pat Metheny

29. “What I look for in musicians is a sense of infinity.”

— Pat Metheny

30. “Whatever my recorded output is, it’s a reflection of a general love of music.”

— Pat Metheny

31. “I love playing and working on music. It is something that I feel really lucky to be able to spend my life doing. And I don’t sleep much!”

— Pat Metheny

32. “I realized that equipment really had little to do with why I sound like the way I sound.”

— Pat Metheny

33. “I hate the way chorus boxes sound.”

— Pat Metheny

34. “I don’t know if I would qualify as mainstream. I think I have managed to function pretty successfully on the fringes of the music world and have been able to play exactly what I have wanted the way I have wanted.”

— Pat Metheny

35. “More and more as time has gone on, I realize that playing is really more about listening than it is about playing.”

— Pat Metheny

36. “The first thing I learned was the theme from Peter Gunn.”

— Pat Metheny

37. “I was able to work with the best musicians in Kansas City starting when I was really young.”

— Pat Metheny

38. “Jazz music will continue to thrive, possibly in unexpected ways.”

— Pat Metheny