CD version. American Garage is the second album by the Pat Metheny Group, recorded in June 1979 and released by ECM that November. On it the quartet settled into the sound it would be known for. Long singing melodies carry the pieces, guitar and keyboards are often voiced as one, and the rhythm section draws openly on rock and American popular music. It opens with (Cross The) Heartland, which became one of the group's signature tunes.

Pat Metheny plays six- and twelve-string guitars and Lyle Mays plays piano, Oberheim synthesizer, autoharp and organ, with Mark Egan on bass and Dan Gottlieb on drums. All five pieces are credited to Metheny and Mays. The band recorded at Long View Farm in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, instead of the Oslo studio used for its earlier ECM sessions. Metheny produced the album himself, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer and Kent Nebergall as engineer. On Mays's website Egan recalls that the group had been touring constantly and already played the new material live. The studio week went into refining the arrangements.

The record lasts only about 35 minutes. (Cross The) Heartland has a spacious, pastoral feel, and Tony Augarde of MusicWeb International hears hints of country music in Metheny's guitar lines. Mays suggested the album title and wrote the opening of the title track, drum part included, before finishing it with Metheny. Egan remembers its grungy attitude, while Augarde picks up traces of boogie-woogie and even the Beatles. The closing The Epic runs to almost thirteen minutes and gives Metheny and Mays their longest solos. Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews counts them among the album's most inspired improvisations.

Both Augarde and Grillo note that the album topped Billboard's jazz chart in 1980, and Augarde adds that it made an impact on the pop charts too. Reviewing the reissue in 2008, he wrote: "This album contains only five tunes but they are all melodious as well as memorable." He also argued that the music flows smoothly without being smooth jazz in the pejorative sense. In 2010 Grillo found that "its virtuosic blend of jazz and roots rock evokes the heartland like no other", and that it had withstood its own commercial success.

This CD is the Touchstones reissue of ECM 1155, first released in 1979. Touchstones is ECM's mid-price series of classic catalogue albums.