05.08
2024Fabiana Palladino Interview
Between experimental takes on the traditional Korean daegeum and Chinese hardcore music, this year’s SXSW saw Austin pulse with music from around the world. One stage, the British Music Embassy, put on an alarming amount of talent, including the emerging r&b rhapsodizer, Fabiana Palladino. Palladino released her first EP in 2011 and signed to Jai Paul’s Paul Institute in 2017, quietly releasing singles ever so often. This January, Palladino announced her self-titled debut album, and it is receiving stunning reviews from outlets like the Guardian. Amid a flurry of press and performance, Palladino found the time to sit down and chat with WVFS.
The drumming at your shows was some of the best in the whole festival; how do you approach creating a drum track for a song? Is it a process of addition and subtraction, or something more abstract than that?
Fabiana: Thanks so much, I have my drummer Ellis Dupuy to thank for that, he’s a really fantastic player who’s been able to translate all the drums/ drum programming on my album into his parts for the live show in such an effortless way. In terms of the approach to creating a drum track for a song, it’s pretty integral when I’m writing the song, it’s often the first instrumental part I work on when i’m still in the songwriting process because it can really move a song forward when you have a groove or certain rhythmic ideas in mind. I’m also just a big drum nerd, I love to think about how one of my favourite drummers might play on my song, or how a certain producer might approach the drum programming. Jai Paul did a lot of the programming on my album and he’s a bit of a master at it – I’d often give him very specific references of how I wanted drums to sound and he’d always take that and run with it, often his rhythmic/sonic decisions in regards to the beat would end up informing the production of the whole song.
We were able to catch you perform at two venues at SXSW, one at a large stage put on by the BME and another in a small lounge with oil paintings next to you as you sang. Where do you see yourself performing when you write these songs?Is it an arena? A small cafe?
Fabiana: I definitely feel more comfortable in a more intimate setting, I love anywhere that feels dark and moody, and I love any kind of unusual venue, somewhere that has a specific aesthetic is always fun, or somewhere that has some kind of history to it. I really wanna play in an amphitheatre at some point.
You’ve been releasing singles for over a decade now, what makes now the time for an album? Was it a singular creative push or more of a culmination of all the work along the way?
Fabiana: Despite the fact that there were many years of being an artist building up to making this first album, I’d say it was a singular creative push. In practical terms, I just wasn’t really in a position to make the kind of album I wanted to make until early 2020, and the timing of that coincided with the pandemic happening and suddenly having all the time in the world to work on it. I was able to really go deep in terms of what I wanted to say creatively, and I actually scrapped a bunch of music I had made in the year running up to that which just didn’t feel relevant or ambitious enough to be part what became the album, so apart from one song, Stay With Me Through The Night, which was written prior to 2020, the majority of the album was written during that period and is a reflection of everything I wanted to say during that time.
Growing up, how did radio influence you? Were there any radio stations you tuned into often? Radio stations you tune into now for inspiration?
Fabiana: Radio was huge for me growing up. I used to record the BBC Radio 1 Chart Show onto a cassette every Sunday and then listen back to it throughout the week. My mum always had the radio on in the car, mainly Capital FM which is a commercial pop radio station in London, and we’d always be singing along and harmonising with whatever was playing on the way to school or wherever. Nowadays I mainly listen to the radio when I’m driving, I flick between BBC Radio 4 which is actually mainly spoken word programming, and Magic FM where they just play old songs. It’s very uncool but I love it. When you drive around London you’ll often pick up on pirate radio stations in certain areas as well. When I’m at home, I have a radio that has DAB/ internet radio on it in the kitchen and I’ll flick through random channels and sometimes find some really interesting stations from around the world, there’s one broadcasting from Mali which I really like. I check out a lot of shows on NTS and Foundation FM too. I made a video for my song I Can’t Dream Anymore which is based on Radio Caroline, the original pirate radio station in the UK. It used to broadcast illegally from a ship in the north sea. I was playing a version of myself who was broadcasting a radio show alone at night from this ship – there’s always been something romantic to me about radio as a format and I thought it would be cool to reference that in a music video.