Hallucinating With Pino Palladino and Blake Mills

Just before Labor Day, I flew out to L.A. to conduct a live interview with Pino Palladino and Blake Mills at a listening event for That Wasn’t a Dream, their strange and dazzling new instrumental duo album. I’d planned to run the text of the Q&A as a post on Hearing Things, but encountered a problem when I went to transcribe it. I had placed my iPhone at the front of the stage to record as the talk began, but it was still connected to my Bluetooth headphones, safely zipped in my backpack and tucked away at the back of the space. The voice memo app defaulted to using the headphone mic as its input when I pressed record. You can hear it clearly when, say, someone in the crowd cracks up at one of Palladino’s wryly self-deprecating quips, but the quips themselves often sound like they’re being delivered from deep in the Pacific Ocean.

As a consolation to myself for my rookie mistake, I’m choosing to believe that the circumstances are oddly appropriate. Palladino and Mills’ arrangements on That Wasn’t a Dream are wispy, nearly translucent. Their melodies are elliptical and ambiguously resolved. A given passage might leave you wondering whether you just heard a guitar or a saxophone, a bass or a mournful human voice. The impression you get as a listener really is like trying to remember music you heard in a dream—or, to put a fine point on it, to call back something you heard someone say a few weeks ago, and all you have to go on is your flickering recollection and a far-off voice on a waterlogged tape. Or so I’m telling myself. 

Taking place at the audiophile destination In Sheep’s Clothing, the evening began with two full playbacks of That Wasn’t a Dream—because too many people had showed up to fit inside at one time. It’s the kind of album that sounds amazing even in a pair of Bluetooth headphones with an overeager mic attachment. On a proper hi-fi system, it made me feel like I was hallucinating. My clearest memory is of “Sonambulista,” a track that begins peacefully, focused on a circular melody delivered in unison by acoustic guitar and Mills’ wordless vocals. Then percussion comes in like a sudden stampede, and three or four different utterly unrecognizable instruments take turns in front of it: flutes, organs, voices, laser beams, or maybe just layers of very creatively manipulated guitar and bass. When this moment happened at In Sheep’s Clothing, it was almost as if I could see these parts actually dancing in front of me. I scribbled a question for later in my notebook: “Do you have any sadness about people hearing this in earbuds at streaming quality?”

The two musicians may not need introductions, but just in case: Palladino is a Welsh-American bass guitarist who did his earliest session work in the early ’80s and is now rightfully regarded as one of the best bassists on Earth. He’s played with the Who, John Mayer, Don Henley, Nine Inch Nails, Tears for Fears, Gary Numan, the list goes on. But his greatest work is with D’Angelo, as a member of the Soulquarians, the backing ensemble that helped develop the funky, off-kilter, softly psychedelic sound of the R&B auteur’s 2000 masterpiece Voodoo. Palladino is also, after the late Jaco Pastorius, the musician who’s done most to popularize the fretless electric bass, an instrument whose silky smoothness defined a certain strain of sophisticated, mildly jazzy ’80s pop. He could easily rest on his laurels, but he remains admirably engaged with contemporary sounds. The alien funk and diaphanous folk on That Wasn’t a Dream is a testament to his ongoing curiosity. 

Mills, a guitarist and producer, is three decades younger than Palladino, but his resume is just as impressive and generationally wide. Recent albums by Perfume Genius, Japanese Breakfast, Hand Habits, and Lucy Dacus all bear his fingerprints. So does Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. Joni Mitchell enlisted him as a key collaborator in her miraculous run of comeback shows over the last several years. And he’s released several understatedly gorgeous singer-songwriter albums of his own. Very few people in the world sound as good as he does fingerpicking a clean Stratocaster, but on That Wasn’t a Dream, he often reaches for the less familiar sound of an instrument he calls the fretless baritone sustainer guitar. Like Palladino’s fretless bass, it allows for a fluid range of motion between the 12 notes of the Western scale, with a neck that’s more like a cello’s than a traditional guitar’s. It’s also outfitted with electronics that upend the way it’s played: The strings are made to resonate through use of a magnetic field rather than a pick, and their tones will sustain indefinitely if you let them. It takes the guitar’s articulation closer to the territory of bowed strings and woodwind instruments, and it’s a big part of That Wasn’t a Dream’s aqueous and unsettled palette.

I’d gotten a chance to briefly speak to Palladino and Mills separately before we sat down for the formal interview. Palladino told me he’d just learned about Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob movies, and joked that he wished he could be Silent Bob. I learned what he meant when we got onstage. He’s a guy who made his career as a backing musician, on an instrument that generally plays a support role, and it seems like he would prefer to let the music talk. He’s not standoffish, he just doesn’t have a strong impulse to explain himself. Mills, on the other hand, seems to like thinking and talking about music nearly as much as he does making it. As a result of their different temperaments—and of Palladino’s beautifully bassy Welsh-accented speaking voice, befitting his 6-foot-8 frame and preference for the musical low end—most of my salvageable audio is of Mills speaking.

Before I get into the Q&A, I will give you one Pino tidbit from after the interview that’s too good not to share. I’d asked him about recording my favorite D’Angelo song, “Betray My Heart,” which is anchored by one of his indelible bass lines. It came out on 2016’s  Black Messiah, but according to Palladino, it was the first thing that he and D—as he affectionately calls his collaborator—ever worked on together, before anything on Voodoo. It only took 15 years to get it ready to release.

OK, on to the interview—heavily truncated, obviously, based on what’s audible on the tape.

One of the defining qualities of this album is your use of various fretless basses and guitars. Can you talk about your relationships with those instruments, and what the possibilities of playing on them that you don’t get from fretted instruments?

Blake Mills: The thing about fretless instruments is the articulation of the note. You can start the note from a lower place, or a higher place—things you can do on almost any other instrument, but not as much on a regular guitar. Any instrumentalist will soon find the limitations of their instrument, the more you play with other people on different instruments. As a guitarist, you can bend a note, and maybe the keyboard player does a little [he mimes using the pitch-bend wheel of an electronic keyboard] and maybe it’s a little [he makes a disappointed face]. And so you reach the edge of your instrument, and you go, Is there some way I can coax a sound out of this that I’m hearing in my head?

For me, fretless playing is like an extension of slide guitar, and with slide guitar there are some sounds you can make that you just can’t make any other way. And with the sustainer pickups—I have this apparatus on the instrument that is just sending a signal to the strings to just resonate at all times. I don’t have to pick the strings to get them going. And you do things with your hands that you would just do on a guitar naturally, and it might sound like a flute or a breath. 

Pino Palladino: It’s more vocal.

There are so many layers on this record, and yet it always sounds very spacious. How much tinkering and overdubbing happens between putting down the basic idea of a song and when it’s finished?

Mills: So much of the beauty of being able to do this in basically the home environment of Sound City [the renowned L.A. studio, opened in 1969, that Mills is now involved in running], is there’s so much space to just keep pushing the envelope. But we have to be able to differentiate between when something has gotten better and when you’re just interested in it because you added a new thing. So the art is in what you end up taking away. 

Do you ever find yourselves trying to impress each other?

Mills: I’ve found myself trying to write like Pino. On this record I composed some things that I learned from playing compositions of Pino’s on the first record that he wrote on guitar. [Addressing Palladino:] Your way of playing guitar, your voice on the instrument, your harmonic choices. I really feel like I’ve learned so much from working with your compositions. So on this record, having a little of that vocabulary, there’s some instances of us—certainly of me—doing something that the other might do. I definitely try to play like you when you’re not around.

Blake, do you remember when you first heard Pino on a record and were consciously like, Who the hell is this bass player? This is blowing my mind right now. 

Mills: My high school bandmate’s father, a musician, was playing D’Angelo for us. We were driving home from school, and he made a remark, “Listen to that bass player. He’s so behind the beat, he’s coming in on the last song.” And it made me pay attention. I had never heard bass played like that before. It made me think about it. 

Palladino: It made you think, What’s wrong with that guy?