For this masterful meeting of musical minds, bass legend Pino Palladino and legend-in-the-making Blake Mills forged a creative partnership that led to a borderless take on small-ensemble instrumental music.
"Yeah, Pino, do you have this big archive of stuff?" Blake Mills is ribbing Pino Palladino about the question I just asked, but it's something we're both very interested to know. "Yeah, I do," the legendary bassist exasperatedly replies, as if he's finally let out the secret that he's been composing and recording original music throughout four-and-a-half decades, keeping it to himself until now.
At 63, Palladino is pretty deep into his career to be releasing his first album of original material. But since the early 1980s, he's been busy contributing to recordings by so many other artists that it really isn't surprising he's just finding the time. "I've waited this long to record something of my own because it's all about space. I've been working on other people's music, which is so different," he says.
Palladino's credits read like a list of the best-selling artists of each decade he's been active, starting in the '80s with Gary Numan, Phil Collins, Elton John, and Don Henley, moving into the '90s alongside Melissa Etheridge, Carly Simon, Eric Clapton, and Michael McDonald, tracking for John Mayer, Erykah Badu, and D'Angelo in the 2000s, and with Keith Urban, John Legend, and Harry Styles in the 2010s—with many, many, many others along the way.
Off The Cuff
What's even more impressive than his resume is that Palladino seems to leave his mark on every session he plays. His nuanced feel adds such a personal touch that it seems as though he puts himself into every note in a way that is instantly recognizable, no matter what style of music he's performing.
On Notes with Attachments, we're finally invited to hear what kind of music has been marinating inside Palladino's head all these years, and the result is exceptional and almost indescribable for its unique sound. Featuring the bassist's compositions, the album was brought to life in collaboration with Mills—who produced, co-wrote, and played on it—and with assistance from heavy-hitting musicians, including keyboardist Larry Goldings, saxophonist Sam Gendel, and drummer Chris Dave.
Throughout the album's 31 minutes, Palladino, Mills, and company throw down an eclectic stew of references that stretch from jazz to minimalism to hip-hop to global sources that span from West Africa to South America. This broad swath of influences makes for a thrilling and dimensional listen, while supple, expert-level grooves provide a warm and cohesive foundation. Every track exhibits high-minded production values that make the album feel futuristic, and we'll be awfully lucky if this is a glimpse of where instrumental music is headed.
"I've waited this long to record something of my own because it's all about space."—Pino Palladino
When pressed about it, Palladino sounds as if the idea of recording an album of his own is something that's always been lingering in the abstract, a possibility that made sense but remained undefined. It wasn't until the last few years that the pieces of the puzzle started to coalesce, as he cut the rhythm tracks for his Fela Kuti-inspired number "Ekuté."
"That came out of something I recorded with drummer Chris Dave at my house in London," Palladino explains. "He and I met in 2009 or so, when we were working on Adele's 21, and started getting together. We recorded that without knowing what we would use it for—whether it would be something of mine or some kind of collaboration between he and I. I showed it to Marcus Strickland, who added the bass clarinet arrangement."
After meeting Mills while working on John Legend's Darkness and Light, Palladino played it for the producer/guitarist, who helped finish the track and explains, "When I played my guitar part on it, I was trying to think like a baritone sax player, where the singer left the band and the baritone sax is playing the melody."
Pino Palladino's career is packed with blue-ribbon studio and stage credits. Here, he stands with the Who, with whom he toured from 2002 to 2017, playing a Fender Jaguar Bass.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography
Pino Palladino's Gear
Basses
- 1961 Fender Precision
- 1963 Fender Precision
- 1960s Magnatone Hurricane
- 1977 Music Man StingRay fretless
Strings
- La Bella Flatwound (various gauges)
- Thomastik-Infeld Flatwound (various gauges)
Mills goes on: "When Pino played that for me, that was the first time that I got to hear Pino as a composer." Intrigued by the possibilities he heard, Mills encouraged the bassist to continue their collaboration, which became an essential part of the album's creative process. Palladino started to present ideas to Mills in various states of completion: some were one or two parts, while others were full demos. "We were uncertain what we were working on," says Mills, adding, "I'm not really sure what we've made or what kind of music this is."
Uncertainty was an asset throughout the recording process, as the two musicians figured out what they would work on and what they could experiment with. Palladino first recorded the track "Soundwalk" in 2000 while snowed in during his tour as a member of D'Angelo's backing band, the Soultronics, on the Voodoo tour. Palladino laid down bass, guitar, and drum machine in his hotel room, and passed it on to his Soultronics bandmate, Jacques Schwarz-Bart, who added a full horn arrangement to the minidisc recording. While he loved the track, the original disc has since gone missing, and the bassist only had an MP3 of the song. Although he could have re-recorded the whole thing, Palladino felt there was something extra-special about Schwarz-Bart's part that would be impossible to recreate.
Kismet intervened when Mills received a demo of a new app called Rebalance, which features a technology that allows users to essentially create stems from full recordings. Mills' friend, software developer Dave Godowsky, was in the studio to demo the app for Mills when Palladino walked in and played them the demo for "Soundwalk." They used Rebalance to extract the horn part and, while Mills explains that Rebalance was capable of a clean extraction, they became inspired as they "toggled between the parts" and messed with the app's settings. The version of the horn arrangement they ended up using allowed artifacts of the original recording to bleed onto the refurbished track, creating a sound Mills describes as "almost anechoic."
TIDBIT: More than 40 years of composing and two-and-a-half years of on-and-off recording went into the creation of this album—the first to feature Pino Palladino's name on its cover.
Then, they used this extracted track to build the new version of the song, with contributions from Gendel, Goldings, and keyboardist Bruce Flowers. The result is a piece of cut-up minimal funk that sounds like a post-J Dilla update to Teo Macero's work on Miles Davis' On the Corner. Different colors of horn and keyboard parts interact sporadically across the stereo field, while weird percussion bits played by Mills groove with Palladino's distinctive bass bubble at the song's core.
It must have felt like advanced mathematics for Palladino and Mills to coordinate their busy schedules, but they found time to work on Notes with Attachments over the course of about two-and-a-half years. "We'd go in for a couple weeks here and there, and sometimes we wouldn't even have time to listen back to something we'd worked on for a couple weeks," says Palladino.
"When I was playing with Pino, I was really trying to watch him and be inspired by what he was playing and how he was playing."—Blake Mills
"Some music you can go in the studio and record quickly. I don't know what this record would sound like if we had done that," says Mills. Since both were constantly immersed in other projects, they had space to step away from the album, giving them perspective to hear their tracks with fresh ears. This patient workflow inspired experiments and challenges that might have never happened if they'd recorded the album faster.
One of Palladino's biggest experiments in making Notes with Attachments was to bring his melodic sense to the fore as he explored approaches to composition and sound that departed from his usual work as a session bassist. On the West African-inspired "Djurkel," Palladino decided to capo up and multi-track his playing in three bass parts, inspired by the 1-stringed instrument that gives the track its name. The song's looping bass figures interweave with each other to create a distorted melody that resembles a mbira ensemble and challenges the role of the bass guitar.
When talking about this composition, Palladino is quick to say the album is not about virtuosity or technique, but Mills interjects. "I think Pino is being humble here," and goes on to explain how the way the bassist phrases his lines and shapes his notes throughout are all informed by the overwhelming depth of his experience. Basically, Palladino puts it all into his playing, and it shows.
After co-forming an early version of the band Dawes, Blake Mills went on to become a touring and studio guitarist, and then a producer. Here, he plays a headlining gig at L.A.'s El Rey Theatre in 2014.
Photo by Debi Del Grande
Palladino is quick to throw the compliment back to Mills, who, throughout our interview, seems to be looking at the big picture of the album and thinking from the perspective of a producer. While Mills is well known as a great guitarist, he often avoids being overtly guitaristic in his extremely prolific production work. His instrumental contributions are mostly understated throughout Notes with Attachments, but there are notable spots where his playing shines, as Palladino points out. The most obvious is the percussive breakout solo he takes on "Man from Molise." There, he's playing a Cuban tres, not a guitar, but that speaks to his instrumental role on the album. While Palladino has the low end on lock, Mills takes an open-eared approach, playing everything from djurkel to Coral electric sitar to guitar synth.
"When I was playing with Pino," Mills says, "I was really trying to watch him and be inspired by what he was playing and how he was playing."It's charming to hear each of these two giants of their instruments defer so strongly to the other's abilities. And it's no show. These guys both know how great the other is, and despite all the time they spend in the studio working on music, they remain excited by the process. While Palladino and Mills clearly love discovering new sounds and creating new tracks, it's also clear they just like to hang out and make music together.
Pino Palladino + Blake Mills + Sam Gendel - Man From Molise (Live)
In December 2020, Pino Palladino, Blake Mills, and saxist Sam Gendel got together at L.A.'s historic Sound City Studios to create live versions of songs from Notes with Attachments. "Man From Molise," from that session, is more subdued than the version on the album, but illustrates some of what each of these musicians brings to the table. Check out Palladino's lead melody starting around 30 seconds, which lasts until he introduces the repeating figure at 1:40 and uplifts the song's simmering 7/4 groove as it supports Mills' soulful lead.
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Onstage, Tommy Emmanuel executes a move that is not from the playbook of his hero, Chet Atkins.
“My biggest decision every day on tour is, ‘What do I want to start with? How do I want to come out of the gate?’” Emmanuel explains to me over a video call. “A good opener has to have everything. It has to be full of surprise, it has to have lots of good ideas, lots of light and shade, and then, hit it again,” he says, illustrating each phrase with his hands and ending with a punch.“You lift off straightaway with the first song, you get airborne, you start reaching, and then it’s time to level out and take people on a journey.”
In May 2023, Emmanuel played two shows at the Sydney Opera House, the best performances from which have been combined on his new release, Live at the Sydney Opera House. The venue’s Concert Hall, which has a capacity of 2,679, is a familiar room for Emmanuel, but I think at this point in his career he wouldn’t bring a setlist if he was playing Wembley Stadium. On the recording, Emmanuel’s mind-blowingly dexterous chops, distinctive attack and flair, and knack for culturally resonant compositions are on full display. His opening song for the shows? An original, “Countrywide,” with a segue into Chet Atkins’ “El Vaquero.”
“When I was going to high school in the ’60s, I heard ‘El Vaquero’ on Chet Atkins’ record, [1964’s My Favorite Guitars],” Emmanuel shares. “And when I wrote ‘Countrywide’ in around ’76 or ’77, I suddenly realized, ‘Ah! It’s a bit like “El Vaquero!”’ So I then worked out ‘El Vaquero’ as a solo piece, because it wasn’t recorded like that [by Atkins originally].
“The co-writer of ‘El Vaquero’ is Wayne Moss, who’s a famous Nashville session guy who played ‘da da da’ [sings the guitar riff from Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Woman’]. And he played on a lot of Chet’s records as a rhythm guy. So once when I played ‘El Vaquero’ live, Wayne Moss came up to me and said, ‘You know, you did my part and Chet’s at the same time. That’s not fair!’” Emmanuel says, laughing.
Atkins is the reason Emmanuel got into performing. His mother had been teaching him rhythm guitar for a couple years when he heard Atkins on the radio and, at 6, was able to immediately mimic his fingerpicking technique. His father recognized Emmanuel’s prodigious talent and got him on the road that year, which kicked off his professional career. He says, “By the time I was 6, I was already sleep-deprived, working too hard, and being forced to be educated. Because all I was interested in was playing music.”
Emmanuel talks about Atkins as if the way he viewed him as a boy hasn’t changed. The title Atkins bestowed upon him, C.G.P. (Certified Guitar Player), appears on Emmanuel’s album covers, in his record label (C.G.P. Sounds), and is inlaid at the 12th fret on his Maton Custom Shop TE Personal signature acoustic. (Atkins named only five guitarists C.G.P.s. The others are John Knowles, Steve Wariner, Jerry Reed, and Atkins himself.) For Emmanuel, even today most roads lead to Atkins.
When I ask Emmanuel about his approach to arranging for solo acoustic guitar, he says, “It was really hit home for me by my hero, Chet Atkins, when I read an interview with him a long time ago and he said, ‘Make your arrangement interesting.’ And I thought, ‘Wow!’ Because I was so keen to be true to the composer and play the song as everyone knows it. But then again, I’m recreating it like everyone else has, and I might as well get in line with the rest of them and jump off the cliff into nowhere. So it struck me: ‘How can I make my arrangements interesting?’ Well, make them full of surprises.”
When Emmanuel was invited to contribute to 2015’s Burt Bacharach: This Guitar’s in Love with You, featuring acoustic-guitar tributes to Bacharach’s classic compositions by various artists, Emmanuel expresses that nobody wanted to take “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” due to its “syrupy” nature. But for Emmanuel, this presented an entertaining challenge.
He explains, “I thought, ‘Okay, how can I reboot “Close to You?’ So even the most jaded listener will say, ‘Holy fuck—I didn’t expect that! Wow, I really like that; that is a good melody!’ So I found a good key to play the song in, which allowed me to get some open notes that sustain while I move the chords. Then what I did is, in every phrase, I made the chord unresolve, then resolve.
Tommy Emmanuel's Gear
“I’m writing music for the film that’s in my head,” Emmanuel says. “So, I don’t think, ‘I’m just the guitar,’ ever.”
Photo by Simone Cecchetti
Guitars
- Three Maton Custom Shop TE Personals, each with an AP5 PRO pickup system
Amps
- Udo Roesner Da Capo 75
Effects
- AER Pocket Tools preamp
Strings & Picks
- Martin TE Signature Phosphor Bronze (.012–.054)
- Martin SP strings
- Ernie Ball Paradigm strings
- D’Andrea Pro Plec 1.5 mm
- Dunlop medium thumbpicks
“And then to really put the nail in the coffin, at the end, ‘Close to you’ [sings melody]. I finished on a major 9 chord which had that note in it, but it wasn’t the key the song was in, which is a typical Stevie Wonder trick. All the tricks I know, the wonderful ideas that I’ve stolen, are from Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie, James Taylor, Carole King, Neil Diamond. All of the people who wrote really incredibly great pop songs and R&B music—I stole every idea I could, and I tried to make my little two-and-a -half minutes as interesting and entertaining as possible. Because entertainment equals: Surprise me.”
I share with Emmanuel that the performances on Live at the Sydney Opera House, which include his popular “Beatles Medley,” reminded me of another possible arrangement trick. In Harpo Marx’s autobiography, Harpo Speaks, I preface, Marx writes of a lesson he learned as a performer—to “answer the audience’s questions.” (Emmanuel says he’s a big fan of the book and read it in the early ’70s.) That happened for me while listening to the medley, when, after sampling melodies from “She’s a Woman” and “Please Please Me,” Emmanuel suddenly lands on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”
I say, “I’m waiting for something that hits more recognizably to me, and when ‘While My Guitar’ comes in, that’s like answering my question.”
“It’s also Paul and John, Paul and John, George,” Emmanuel replies. “You think, ‘That’s great, that’s great pop music,’ then, ‘Wow! Look at the depth of this.’”
Often Emmanuel’s flights on his acoustic guitar are seemingly superhuman—as well as supremely entertaining.
Photo by Ekaterina Gorbacheva
A trick I like to employ as a writer, I say to Emmanuel, is that when I’m describing something, I’ll provide the reader with just enough context so that they can complete the thought on their own.
“You can do that musically as well,” says Emmanuel. He explains how, in his arrangement of “What a Wonderful World,” he’ll play only the vocal melody. “When people are asking me at a workshop, ‘How come you don’t put chords behind that part?’ I say, ‘I’m drawing the melody and you’re putting in all the background in your head. I don’t need to tell you what the chords are. You already know what the chords are.’”
“Wayne Moss came up to me and said, ‘You know, you did my part and Chet’s at the same time. That’s not fair!’”
Another track featured on Live at the Sydney Opera House is a cover of Paul Simon’s “American Tune” (which Emmanuel then jumps into an adaptation of the Australian bush ballad, “Waltzing Matilda”). It’s been a while since I really spent time with There GoesRhymin’ Simon (on which “American Tune” was first released), and yet it sounded so familiar to me. A little digging revealed that its melody is based on the 17th-century Christian hymn, “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” which was arranged and repurposed by Bach in a few of the composer’s works. The cross-chronological and genre-lackadaisical intersections that come up in popular music sometimes is fascinating.
“I think the principle right there,” Emmanuel muses, “is people like Bach and Beethoven and Mozart found the right language to touch the heart of a human being through their ears and through their senses ... that really did something to them deep in their soul. They found a way with the right chords and the right notes, somehow. It could be as primitive as that.
Tommy Emmanuel has been on the road as a performing guitarist for 64 years. Eat your heart out, Bob Dylan.
Photo by Jan Anderson
“It’s like when you’re a young composer and someone tells you, ‘Have a listen to Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind,”’ he continues. “‘Listen to how those notes work with those chords.’ And every time you hear it, you go, ‘Why does it touch me like that? Why do I feel this way when I hear those chords—those notes against those chords?’ I say, it’s just human nature. Then you wanna go, ‘How can I do that!’” he concludes with a grin.
“You draw from such a variety of genres in your arrangements,” I posit. “Do you try to lean into the side of converting those songs to solo acoustic guitar, or the side of bridging the genre’s culture to that of your audience?”
“I stole every idea I could, and I tried to make my little two-and-a-half minutes as interesting and entertaining as possible. Because entertainment equals: Surprise me.”
“If I was a method actor,” Emmanuel explains, “what I’m doing is—I’m writing music for the film that’s in my head. So, I don’t think, ‘I’m just the guitar,’ ever. I always think it has to have that kind of orchestral, not grandeur, but … palette to it. Because of the influence of Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, and Elton John, especially—the piano guys—I try to use piano ideas, like putting the third in the low bass a lot, because guitar players don’t necessarily do that. And I try to always do something that makes what I do different.
“I want to be different and recognizable,” he continues. “I remember when people talked about how some players—you just hear one note and you go, ‘Oh, that’s Chet Atkins.’ And it hit me like a train, the reason why a guy like Hank Marvin, the lead guitar player from the Shadows.... I can tell you: He had a tone that I hear in other players now. Everyone copied him—they just don’t know it—including Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, all those people. I got him up to play with me a few times when he moved to Australia, and even playing acoustic, he still had that sound. I don’t know how he did it, but it was him. He invented himself.”
YouTube It
Emmanuel performs his arrangement of “What a Wonderful World,” illustrating how omitting a harmonic backdrop can have a more powerful effect, especially when playing such a well-known melody.
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