Foto-© Buster Grey-Jung
Und die nächste Anwärterin, die in 2024 den Sound bestimmen will: Fabiana Palladino kündigt ihr selbstbetiteltes Debütalbum bei Jai Pauls Label Paul Institute für den 5. April an. Die britische Sängerin, Songwriterin, Multi-Instrumentalistin und Produzentin, die schon seit Jahren mit vereinzelten Singles immer wieder auf sich aufmerksam macht und aus einer musikalischen Familie stammt (ihr Vater ist der legendäre Session-Bassist Pino Palladino, ihr Bruder Rocco Palladino spielt Bass bei Yussef Days), setzt sich darauf mit komplexen Fragen zu Liebe und Einsamkeit in Beziehungen auseinander. Das Ergebnis sind 10 Songs, die sich von den großen R&B-, Soul-, Pop- und Disco-Studioproduktionen der 80er und 90er Jahre inspirieren lassen, gefiltert durch einen modernen Blinkwinkel. Es ist eine intime Platte, die die Toughness und Weiblichkeit von Janet Jackson auf ihrem 1986er Album Control und Annie Lennox‘ bei DIVA ausstrahlt, das klassische Songwriting von Kate Bush und Joni Mitchell aufgreift und die romantischen Motown-Duette von Marvin Gaye und Tammi Terrell unterläuft, um die Normativität in Beziehungen zu hinterfragen. “I wanted to push myself production-wise,” sagt sie darüber. “I wanted high-production value sounds because I grew up listening to music that was made in studios, played by great musicians and recorded by brilliant engineers, and I really appreciate that.”
Über ihr Debütalbum sowie die mit der Ankündigung erschienene Single Stay With Me Through The Night sagt Fabiana selbst: “A central theme of the album is aloneness. Whether it’s a song where I’m searching for connection with someone else, or trying to embrace the aloneness, it tends to come back to me, who I am when I’m alone, what I feel when I really look inwards. I’d say it’s a pretty introspective record overall. The songs are often about trying to go deeper into yourself, exploring your true feelings and how they then relate to and affect your relationships with others.
Stay With Me Through The Night is the first song I wrote for the album. It was at the end of a tricky period where I hadn’t written music for nearly two years, and it came out in a bit of a flood, I barely even remember where or how I wrote it, but I knew it was going to be an important song for me. It ended up being the centrepiece of the album, a song that encapsulates a lot of the feeling and emotion of the rest of the record and musically it brings old together with new, which became a theme across the record…a way of combining my influences with a modern perspective.
Rhythmically the feeling of the song comes from funk and disco, I was thinking about the piano playing of Patrice Rushen and Michael McDonald, Chaka Khan’s ‘What Cha’ Gonna Do For Me’, Bernard Edwards bass playing on Chic’s ‘Good Times’, and The Bee Gees ‘Spirits Having Flown’ but we tried to take the track somewhere else in other aspects of the production to bring out the big feelings in the song. It situates us in the emotional world that I tried to create for the rest of the album.”
“I had a significant relationship that ended followed by a period of a few years of like: what the hell am I doing?”, erklärt sie weiter. “People are getting married and having kids around you, and I was not in that at all. There’s a certain amount of pain in having to accept that that’s not the way it’s gone. But also: how can I embrace that and create power for myself? I feel amazing about it now, and so happy that my life has gone in that way.”
