New Album: Pino Palladino and Blake Mills, Notes With Attachments

Out now, Notes With Attachments…

Notes With Attachments, the new album from renowned bassist Pino Palladino and celebrated multi-instrumentalist and producer Blake Mills, is out today via New Deal / Impulse!; listen/share HERE.

Initially conceived as a solo record for Palladino, Notes With Attachments quickly evolved into a fully collaborative work centered around the two artists’ love for experimentation.

“It all evolved from me playing Blake a few ideas, getting a reaction from [him] and seeing if he’d be interested in working on [them],” says Palladino about the album’s genesis. “As the project evolved in the first few weeks and months, it dawned on both of us that it would be a collaborative record.”

“I think both of us are musically drawn to find some kind of exception to a rule, whatever that rule may be,” says Mills. “On this record, it was often about trying to identify some sort of feeling; and then, respectfully, not to cater to its typical sensibilities, whether that was stylistically, with the arrangement, with the mix, with instrumentation. Once we caught a scent of something, we’d start heading in the opposite direction to see what we might find.”

That process touches every song on the record, which typically began with Palladino’s own melodic and rhythmic language and developed outward with references shared by the two musicians from West African and Cuban music, funk, jazz and English folk. 

Recorded in stages over two and a half years, Notes With Attachments brings together a preeminent group of musicians from the worlds of jazz, R&B, pop, and beyond: the drummer Chris Dave (D’Angelo, Anderson .Paak); the innovative saxophonists Sam Gendel, Marcus Strickland, and Jacques Schwartz-Bart; the keyboardist Larry Goldings (James Taylor, John Scofield); and others. It is both a producers’ album and a players’ album, exploring bits of musical vocabulary common to the two musicians, then defamiliarizing them.

Two-time Grammy Awards Producer of the Year nominee Blake Mills has released four solo albums and produced and recorded with artists such as Alabama Shakes, Fiona Apple, Bob Dylan, John Legend, Perfume Genius, Jim James, Moses Sumney, Laura Marling, Phoebe Bridgers, Cass McCombs, Sara Bareilles, Weyes Blood and Randy Newman. His most recent album Mutable Set, released last year, was praised by Pitchfork as “a hushed collection that floats through the subconscious like a tender dream” and earned their Best New Music title.

Pino Palladino is a Grammy Award winning songwriter, producer and bassist who helped create the rhythm-section sound of D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Black Messiah, and over a four-decade career has worked with artists including Keith Richards, Erykah Badu, Eric Clapton, Nine Inch Nails, Questlove, John Mayer, Paul Simon, Jeff Beck, Herbie Hancock and Adele.