I love playing this piece (the second track of Pat Metheny's 1997 Album, Imaginary Day) in solo guitar settings. Pat Metheny is just so cool in the way he writes as a guitarist, not just for guitar. Many of his songs are playable, expressive, and harmonically deep without being unnecessarily dense, leveraging the guitar's natural tendency to exploit different tonalities at the same time (all those open strings).
My favourite thing here is how he creates harmonic movement, like the progression from C major to Ebmaj7♭5 to Fmaj7♭5. It sits across a few keys, but flows naturally due to smooth voice leading and triadic clarity. There aren’t complex voicings with lots of extensions—just simple, open structures that resonate clearly. So the effect is playing in G major, E minor, C major, even Eb major.
So often with modern music, the focus is destabilising the key centre through dissonance, chromaticism, or rapid modulation. Here, it’s the opposite—tonal ambiguity through consonance. Gentle, spacious, and modal, classic Pat Metheny sound.