Songfacts®:

• "As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita" is the title track of jazz guitarist Pat Metheny and jazz pianist and Pat Metheny Group member Lyle Mays' collaborative album released in April 1981. The album grew out of compositional ideas that Metheny and Mays felt were too personal and atmospheric for the Pat Metheny Group. It was recorded at Arne Bendiksen Studio, Oslo, in September 1980.
• "As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita" Falls is a wordplay riff on a classic American political idiom - the kind of phrase used to predict electoral outcomes, such as "As goes New Hampshire, so goes the nation." According to Pat Metheny, the title was suggested by a friend because it suited the music's atmospheric, hard-to-pin-down quality. The linguistic cleverness is that Wichita and Wichita Falls are two real places - Wichita, Kansas and Wichita Falls, Texas - but the verb "falls" doubles as the noun in Wichita Falls, causing the sentence to grammatically fold back on itself in a surreal, poetic way.
  
  The connection to Wichita is also personal: Metheny and Mays first met at the Wichita Jazz Festival in 1975, making the title a tribute to the city where their creative partnership was born.
• The song runs 20 minutes and 44 seconds, occupying the entire first side of the original vinyl LP. It functions as an extended tone poem, beginning sparsely, with berimbau and synthesizer textures slowly layering over each other, before building through waves of melody and rhythm to a transcendent, almost orchestral climax.
  
  "It was a transition period for me," Pat Metheny told Uncut magazine. "By that time, I was leaning into synths a lot. It was an interesting period for tech at that moment - suddenly we had polyphonic instruments."
• Percussionist Naná Vasconcelos joined Metheny and Mays on the album. Vasconcelos was a Brazilian master of the berimbau, a one-stringed percussive instrument of West African origin. "I recognized that to be able to really utilize those instruments effectively, they had to be balanced with some kind of earth element," said Metheny. "So when I met Nana Vasconcelos, that really set up this palette of potential."
• When Metheny and Mays changed planes in London to get to the recording in Oslo, the baggage handlers were on strike. "We had these synths with us, so Lyle and I went down and physically took the stuff off one plane and put it on the other," Metheny recalled. "Can you imagine that now?"
• A section of "As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita" beginning at 14:56 was adopted by Christian Dior for its Fahrenheit perfume and cologne advertising in 1988, the same year the fragrance launched. Fahrenheit was created by perfumers Maurice Roger and Jean-Louis Sieuzac and became one of Dior's most iconic fragrances. The moody, atmospheric sweep of Metheny and Mays's music proved a perfect sonic match for the ads, which ran for decades and introduced the track to a mass global audience far beyond the jazz world.
• As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls reached #1 on the Billboard Jazz Albums chart and crossed over to #50 on the main US Album chart, a remarkable achievement for an album of this length and abstraction.