PINO PALLADINO & BLAKE MILLS
THAT WASN’T A DREAM
OUT August 22nd, 2025
Bassist Pino Palladino and guitarist Blake Mills don’t make obvious music. Instead, their collaborative work moves with a deep, unshakable pocket—even when rhythm feels elusive—and carries a harmonic language that’s as rich as it is mysterious. There is subtlety at play, but it’s not softness. It’s precision, intention, and a quiet kind of daring. Their second instrumental album, That Wasn’t a Dream, expands on the joy of discovery that animated 2021’s Notes With Attachments. Built around the kind of deep musical chemistry that makes spontaneous composition feel effortless, it drifts between form and freedom.
Both artists are revered for their accomplishments, yet neither is bound by them. The Grammy-winning Palladino has reshaped what bass can be in popular music, performing with everyone from D’Angelo to Nine Inch Nails, from Erykah Badu to John Mayer. Meanwhile, Grammy-winning and two-time Producer of the Year-nominee Mills is one of today’s most sought-after producers and multi-instrumentalists, known for his work with Alabama Shakes, Bob Dylan, Fiona Apple, and Perfume Genius. Together, they dissolve any sense of hierarchy.
They had home-court advantage, too. While Notes With Attachments was recorded across studios and cities, That Wasn’t a Dream was recorded over a two-month period in the legendary Studio A at Sound City Studios, a room which Mills has helmed since 2018. These sessions pulled in collaborators old and new, most notably Sam Gendel, who performed throughout Notes With Attachments and contributed finishing touches for nearly every track on That Wasn’t a Dream. Though ultimately, this record feels like a deepening of the core relationship between Palladino and Mills.
If Notes With Attachments was about creating cohesion out of layered spontaneity, That Wasn’t a Dream finds coherence through restraint. As Palladino explains, some of the compositions grew from harmonically dense ideas that were later reduced to the barest essentials. "It came to light, really, that if we could make something work with the least possible ingredients, space could become the centerpiece," says Palladino. It was also a chance to innovate; one early Palladino sketch, "What is Wrong With You?," was Mills’s first opportunity to experiment with the prototype of a new instrument, the fretless baritone sustainer guitar, which Mills helped luthier Duncan Price to develop in 2021, and has since pioneered on numerous productions, as well as live performances with Joni Mitchell.
“The fretless sustainer can sound almost like a cross between a woodwind, brass, and bowed string instrument,” says Mills. “It’s a tough instrument to control or define.” That undefinable sound, along with a playful approach to minimalism, set the tone for the rest of the album’s writing and recording sessions that would take place almost three years later.
"When Pino’s playing bass, and I'm playing melodically on the fretless baritone, the ability for one of us to also play the chords is very limited,” continues Mills. "Somewhat after the fact, we realized how good that could actually sound, when some of the crucial harmonic intentions of the music were being outlined by only two melodies." Centering on counterpoint is one of the album’s defining characteristics. It’s a subtle move with sometimes radical results, but one that also allows the music to resonate with more of a personal tone. Palladino sees it akin to futuristic pop music, taking on impressionistic tonal colors and esoteric rhythms with the vigor and economy of Top 40’s greatest and most fearless arrangements.
As a result, the music on That Wasn’t a Dream goes from being deceptively intimate to beautifully disordered. "I Laugh in the Mouth of the Lion" evokes “lawless alien tavern music,” says Mills, combed through with Gendel’s wind-controlled harps and synth pads. The abstractly chaotic "Somnambulista," whose title riffs on the clinical word for “sleepwalker,” features a rather unfussy vocal performance, used not as narration but as an oddly cheerful doubling of the guitar melody.
On "Contour," the album’s twilit opener, Palladino’s finger-picked guitar casts a starry scene, where listeners might start to imagine various constellated shapes; Palladino calls it a gradual introduction to a fantasy world. In "Taka," seemingly disjointed buzzes and pulsing build toward a layered, almost kaleidoscopic funk composition. Then there’s "Heat Sink," the album’s sensational 14-minute centerpiece featuring Palladino’s son, Rocco, on bass alongside his father and Mills on the fretless baritone sustainer guitar. The final recording, with all these soaring twists and turns, was the result of the trio sitting down one night to practice the form against what turned out to be very rough guide tracks for a handful of different song ideas. As Mills explains, “There were multiple ideas for what we could build with this ostinato of Pino’s. I think we had sketched out something like five different ways it could be harmonized. Rocco was over one night, and we sat down to experiment with playing one of those ideas, and we just kept playing on past the guide, so then the next sketch would pop up and it still worked with whatever we were doing, so we just kept going and going until we’d gone through all of the ideas.”
The more time one spends with That Wasn’t a Dream, the more comforting its mystery becomes: What kind of music is this? It’s music that rewards close listening without presuppositions. As Mills notes, there’s something sensational about holding tension without resolution. That sensation here is the lurch of a melody falling into unexpected harmony, the thrill of hearing sounds emerge from instruments you can’t quite identify, that maybe don’t exist.
Characters are frequently disguised: fretless guitar mimicking wind, wind controller imitating harp. The musicians here trade roles constantly, each becoming more present than their instrument to cultivate a kind of beauty that doesn't always present itself in familiar ways.
On the album closer, "That Was a Dream," the duo accomplishes this gently but persuasively. It feels like a lullaby, a last ripple before the stillness. And even here, something subversive is happening. The melody is delivered by doubled fretless bass, making it feel like what was once foundational is finally flying, a decision that at first unsettled Palladino. But that instability became the track’s emotional core. Mills likens it to a flower turned upside down—the colorful part buried, the roots exposed.
In many ways, that image captures the entire record. The off-kilter, quietly radical bits are centered, an atypical root structure is elevated, and things that once felt obscured begin to resonate.
It is the spring of 2019, and Chris Weisman's landline is ringing in Brattleboro, Vermont. On the other end, in Los Angeles, Blake Mills is assembling a venturesome dream team of songwriters for a television series he's been tapped to create the music for. The two of them are, at this point, complete strangers. Chris is decades deep into an ossified obscurity-it can feel like (blessing or curse) a kind of invisibility. But Blake sees him. The planet turns, becomes crazier.
It is the spring of 2022, and Weisman is at the Steinway. He and Blake are composing his overlay voicings together, a layer of icing, for the bridge to “THERE IS NO NOW” that they just wrote from scratch--lyrics, melody, chords, Blake at his Goya, Chris pacing the perimeter of this illustrious room, Studio A of SOUND CITY STUDIOS in Van Nuys, California, veritably vibrating with history you could cut with a knife. Chris plays a big, sweet Ab Major 9 on the downbeat, and the whole room sings. Where an F minor turns Major, Blake suggests the 3rd should resolve an octave lower instead of traveling up a half-step, eschewing the obvious voice leading for an octave displacement. These are the leaps. It is heavenly-voiced down, the A natural seems to glow gently orange.
Blake is in his customary crouch over pedals, at the foot of the console with his baritone fretless sustainer guitar. Infinitely tall Joseph Lorge, with his signature blue work shirt and big, green eyes, is in the chair beside him, turned toward the screen. They work telepathically, quickly, seemingly flawlessly. It doesn't matter how important the moment is--to a song, a record, a career--there is no pressure of import, no ritual. This is the guitar solo on “SKELETON IS WALKING.” All the tension built up in Blake's one-note, incantatory vocal is finally breaking, exploding from his guitar like enormous, time-lapse flowers unfolding themselves.
The album opens under pointillistic stars, cosmic wheeling forms, an abyss of perplexity. On the title track, Chris's horn calls out over a pleasure of drums and slashing classical guitars. There are no constellations, no narratives to navigate on “JELLY ROAD.” We let ourselves dream, and we let ourselves beam. We open outside of time, we end by refusing to.
Speak to me in breadcrumbs
Speak to me in code
Tell me it again
About the Jelly Road
~ Blake Mills & Chris Weisman ~
