Pino Palladino: That Was a Dream

Mark 2025 as a big year on the Pino Palladino timeline. The Welsh bassist is of course best known for stylistic right turns that mirror seismic shifts in the music world, including pop radio-dominating fretless lines with Paul Young; neo-soul and hip hop-defining fingerstyle fretted grooves with D’Angelo; and savvy singer-songwriter parts with John Mayer. This year saw the release of Pino’s signature Ernie Ball Smoothie Flats strings and the reissue of his signature ’79 Music Man StingRay in several models [See Here]. He also played all over two of the year’s biggest sides, Elton John and Brandi Carlisle’s Who Believes in Angels? and Miley Cyrus’ Something Beautiful.

Best of all artistically was the late-August release of That Wasn’t a Dream, Palladino’s sophomore collaboration with guitarist/producer Blake Mills, following their acclaimed 2021 effort, Notes with Attachments [Impulse!]. As with Notes, the pair dabble in deconstructing their genre-defying instrumentals with the help of saxophonist Sam Gendel and drummer Chris Dave, plus guest contributions from drummers Steve Jordan and Abe Rounds, keyboardist Dory Bavarski, and bassist Rocco Palladino. Notes Pino, “Basically we’re trying to keep ourselves intruiged and surprised in our compositions. That’s why we enjoy working with instrumental music. It opens up so many possibilities and the more mysterious it is the closer you listen.”

The two key elements that make the seven-track Dream different from its predecessor are a focus on Palladino’s guitar playing and writing, and the emergence of Mills’ fretless baritone sustainer guitar as a main voice on the record. The result is the duo crossing over into each other’s worlds to compelling creative effect. Offers Pino, “Blake and I talked about how some of the tunes on the first album came from my guitar parts, so one of our thoughts was for me to play more guitar and for us to play more guitar together—mostly nylon-string acoustic guitars. We wanted to bring that sensibility to the record. I love to play guitar. I’ve been playing it longer than I’ve been playing bass, actually. Plus I’ve always gravitated towards it for writing purposes. Most of the tracks started with Blake and I playing guitars together to a click or some kind of rhythm guide.”

Whatever their methods, each song takes on its own personality. “Contour” is a languorous, guitar-driven voyage downstream. “I Laugh In the Mouth of the Lion” gets its vibe from soundscapes not quite in tune with each other. “Somnambulista” rides two different meters at once. “Taka” is a nod to Palladino’s passion for West African music and rhythms. “What Is Wrong with You?” dramatically disassembles a Pino composition from his PSP Trio days. And “Heat Sink” is an epic 14-minute journey built around a bass harmonics melody.

While those tracks rely on the mystery of multiple bass and guitar parts often not distinguishable from each other, the gorgeous record-closing samba “That Was a Dream” is a clear bass feature supported by composer Blake Mills’ nylon string guitar and wordless vocals. Mills credits the song to the influence of Uruguayan guitarist Eduardo Mateo, a singer-songwriter whose classic ’70s and ’80s albums helped develop the country’s modern music by blending traditional rhythms with rock, bossa nova, and psychedelia. Stepping up for his starring role, Palladino played the melody on his Rob Allen Mb-2 fretless and then decided to double it using his famed fretless ’79 StingRay, so there are two tracks of bass.

The ten-bar intro is a key as Mills plays guitar while singing the first melody, establishing its quarter-note, half-note, eighth-note pace (not shown). This helps make it clear that Pino is playing the melody when he makes his dramatic entrance in the low register at Letter A. Thus the D in measure 11 and the C in bar 12 are not roots but the sixths of their respective chords, creating a darkly delicious tension of harmony and ambiguity. In fact, the abundance of major 6th chords and the wide intervals of a sixth in the melody give the piece its distinctive harmonic flavor. Also of note is the uneven number of measures in the song’s sections (A and B are seven bars each, C and D are ten bars each).

Palladino continues his lead line in Letter B, adding vibrato where felt and arriving at another ambiguous, tasty tension in bars 22-23. There his low D melody note has a pedal-like affect with Mill’s guitar voicing [G-D-Bb-Eb-G]. Letter C marks a shift from an Eb major tonality to G major. It also marks the entrance of low F’s in 30-31 and 33-34, which is Pino deciding to break from doubling the melody on his StingRay track to provide some supportive bass notes.

Letter D serves as a sort of transition, with Pino finishing a melodic phrase in 35, playing bass notes that move from G major back to Eb major in 36-40, and finishing the melody in 41-43 (heard earlier in 14-16). Letter E restates Letter B and Letter F restates Letter C. Letter G is a variation on Letter D, sitting longer on the Em chord, which allows Pino to play a low open E support note on his StingRay beneath the E melody note on his Rob Allen. Letter H both shifts and introduces new harmony, starting with a Cm7 instead of the previous F6 (at Letter E) and then the ear-grabbing Eadd9 (instead of the expected Eb6), making Pino’s melody note the major 7th.

Letter I is the final section and it extends on a repeated three-bar phrase first heard in 86-88 (one bar of Am9, two bars of Em9). Of the fifteen times the phrase repeats, Pino plays the melody over the Am9 chord on most of them, but there are variations from both Palladino and Mills. On the bass side Pino often plays bass notes on the Em9 chord, either the root or the fifth (as in 90 and 93). Mills affects the most change with his chord substitutions, such as A major instead of A minor in 95, F#m7b5 instead of Am9 in 98, Gmaj7 and Am7b5 stepping in for Em and Am in 106-107, and Am7b5 in 110 and 113. Back on the bottom Pino adds motion in 115 and 128, and harmonics in 118 and 126-127 before closing with the last three melody notes. Lay back and try to play the melody with a vocal quality.

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