1992 - Secret Story - The Best Album of the Year

The summer of 1992.  I was approaching my 26th birthday and stopped into our locally owned music store and picked up a CD of Pat Metheny’s newly released “Secret Story”.  I remember listening to this in my car with my year-old daughter (now nearly 17) and thinking this was the freshest thing I had heard in all of my young life.  I was a die hard rocker and worked as a music director for a top country radio station in Missouri.  I had always dabbled in Jazz because of my mother’s underpinnings to the St. Louis jazz community but this album became a landmark in my collection.  To this day, I value it’s story in music among the best I have.  The video above is pretty cool in itself but you have to listen to the entire CD to get the picture.  From what I gathered, Metheny had a great nearly year long relationship with a lady who then broke it off after the summer and broke Metheny’s heart in the process.  That’s my take on it…The actual facts might be slightly different but Metheny himself at the time said the story tells itself in the music.  As I remember “The Longest Summer” (The Video), I could sense a feeling of exhilaration, passion, and freshness to the relationship.  Near the end of the CD, the sadness of the final songs leads one to believe the breakup was extremely hard.  A special 15th anniversary edition of the album was released late last year marking this album as a classic.  I’m torn between my favorite Metheny albums.  I believe this one was the best of its genre for the 90’s.  “One Quiet Night” which was released in 2003 has been his best for first decade of the 21st century.  Of late, Metheny has been recording with pianist Brad Mehldau and the two have put together two great albums in the last few years.  But “Secret Story” has to be the best album I heard in 1992.