Hallucinating With Pino Palladino and Blake Mills
The two virtuosos talk about the appeal of fretless instruments and the D'Angelo classic that was started 16 years before it came out.
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.
