Fabiana Palladino is balancing perfectionism and knowing when to let go

In November 2017, Jai Paul’s most dedicated fans received a text from the Paul Institute, the covert and coy record label set up by Jai and his brother, A.K Paul.

It read:

“This is a message from the Paul Institute. Two new releases are now available. Please login at http://paul.institute. Your Cyber Pass is: [USER NUMBER]. Peace.

“We would like to introduce you to two new artists at the Institute:

“Fabiana Palladino and Ruthven”*

Mystery, Palladino’s first officially released song, immediately set the Paul fanbase alight. Part of the focus was on Jai, whose elusivity remains a mystery to many — it’s usually a big deal when he breaks his silence. But Palladino’s aptly-named track, which was only available to purchase for two days, sold out of physical copies, and her sound left people curious for more.

“I just had to switch off my phone and go offline for a few days because I was just… I hadn’t dealt with any of that before. And it was quite scary.”

Palladino is speaking to us from her home in London, seven years since Mystery dropped. Her follow-up singles, Shimmer and Waiting, arrived in 2018 and 2020, respectively. Much like Jai, her self-proclaimed perfectionism kept an audience hanging on to fragments of material for years before she was ready to release a more comprehensive body of work.

After four years of no new music, her debut album Fabiana Palladino was released this month on Paul Institute, a subsidiary of XL Recordings. Critics and fans are already dubbing it “a masterpiece” and the best debut album of 2024 — does she still disconnect from online discourse like she did with Mystery?

“I know how to go about these releases now; how to shut certain things off…I’d said to people at the label that I don’t want to read any [reviews],” Palladino says. “It hadn’t even occurred to me that there would be a Guardian review. But my manager texted me saying, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to read any? I think you might want to have a look at the headline…” The outlet had awarded the album a rare five stars.

Palladino’s sporadic and limited release schedule isn’t strictly intentional, nor has she strived to shy away from an audience. As a session musician like her father, Pino Palladino, Fabiana has recorded and performed consistently in the past decade. She’s joined the likes of Jessie Ware, Sampha, and even Jai Paul onstage, playing as a band member in his debut live show at Coachella 2023. She and her band also opened for Jai in his London, New York, L.A. and Melbourne sets which, I can confirm, were simply excellent. To celebrate her album launch, Palladino and her band also delivered a sublime, intimate performance at Rough Trade East, London — she’s certainly a natural onstage.

As a producer, though, Palladino faced novel pressures. “I had to keep up the momentum of a career. I hadn’t released anything for, like, a couple of years — you know, there was a big gap,” she says, almost agitated. “I definitely felt like I had to keep things moving, but it was kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: because I stressed myself out so much, it actually made it even more difficult to move fast.

“People kept saying to me, ‘It’ll happen when it happens,’ and I just found that really annoying. I was like, ‘Well, you’re not the one who hasn’t released anything in five years,’ she laughs. “But it’s true, it will just happen when it happens. And you have to get these things right; it was a balance that I had to strike between perfectionism and knowing when to let go.”

Happily, this internal battle paid off. The album is a considered, lustrous and poignant body of work, with immense production that blends rich, moving neo-soul-style vocals with 80s-style synths, chorus guitars, and swung drum beats.

The album’s opener, Closer, is an elegant, simmering alt-R&B track with a complex yet commanding bassline, with synth pads and bells laying the perfect bed for her layered falsetto. The album’s lead single, I Care, is a Jai Paul collaboration with outstanding mixing and musicianship that allows both artist’s eerie and near-desperate cries to pierce. Meanwhile, I Can’t Dream Anymore hears Palladino channel a 2020s take on soft rock that would make Wilson Phillips proud.

Palladino challenges concepts of love and loneliness in the album, having made the album after seeing out a long-term relationship. But, though she self-produced most of the LP, she had warm support from those close to her.

“Fabi likes to play her cards close to her chest,” says her dad, Pino, speaking to us from L.A. “Sometimes when you get an initial idea and sound, it takes a long time to actually get it into shape. Fabi definitely had a vision…[but] it would take quite a lot to get a version of a demo to listen to if she wasn’t ready to play it. My wife, Maz, has really been there all the way with Fabi and has probably heard all the versions of every song.”

An acclaimed bassist, with credits on records by Elton John, D’Angelo, The Who and Beyoncé, Pino was also a collaborator on his daughter’s album.

“I will always want to make my music with people that I have a personal relationship with,” says Fabiana. “It doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to share this very personal stuff[…]with someone I’ve never met before.

“With my dad, it’s the ultimate safe zone to create in or be honest in or whatever.”

Jai Paul and engineer Harry Craze, meanwhile, played crucial supportive roles in the album, too.

“In terms of the album, it was very natural for me to work with Jai and Harry,” says Palladino. “These are people I have a friendship with and I trust. They push me or challenge me in certain ways that maybe someone else might not feel totally comfortable to do and vice versa.”

Though the songs sound slick and polished, they are mostly born in “somewhat of a DIY way” between her bedroom and the XL Recordings studio in London. But Palladino says she “was trying very much to make it sound like it wasn’t [DIY]. It was like a challenge that I set myself — like, how high-end can we make it sound, even though it’s not mostly recorded in special environments. I basically wanted it to sound like a more elevated version of what I’d recorded.”

The Roland Juno-106 and Yamaha DX7 (and Arturia emulation of the latter) were central instruments in the sound of the album, taking care of the lush synth sounds. Her guitars and mics were run direct into her trusty Universal Audio Apollo Twin interface and laptop running Logic Pro, and her vocal setup (mostly recorded in XL’s studio) comprised a Neve 1073 preamp and a Neumann U 87.

“Even in the early demos, stylistically, there was a lot of Juno, [Roland] Jupiter synths and 80s drum sounds, also some 90’s sounds,” Harry Craze tells me of the recordings.

“The songs were well written and, even though they were pretty minimal, they had a distinctive style. So after talking to Fabiana, it was really about building on what was there and making a little world for them. I was shape-shifting between vocal production, sound design, mixing or anything really depending on what the track needed but normally I would talk with Fabiana and discuss the song then make a start. A lot of the time, Fabiana would just jam on an instrument and if I felt she was on to something I’d record it and then she might finesse the part and we would re-record.”

Despite recording music in her bedroom from a young age (“even when she was in school, she was making demos of songs”, says Pino), Fabiana has struggled to identify as ‘a producer’. Mostly, it’s because she’s been under the impression that a music producer is a purely scientific role — one that demands knowledge of “the science and the physics” of sound. Fortunately, she came to the realisation that a lot of music production can be learned from trial, error, and instinct.

There was no fear of experimentation in the recording stages. For Shoulda, Palladino recorded her brother Rocco playing drums at home with a “very basic mic setup…almost to just try it and see if I could do it. And it turned out alright,” she says.

For Stay With Me Through The Night, she enlisted Pino to record bass and drums from an LA studio, with help from Steve Ferrone and Eric Thorngren.

“I’m still not someone that could go into a big studio and really have an understanding of everything that’s going on in there,” she says. “But it doesn’t intimidate me because I just sort of think, ‘I’m not gonna let it intimidate me.’ There’s no reason for it.”

Craze adds praise to her skill in the studio, saying that he “took Fabiana’s lead; she knew what she was trying to do.”

The whole album, thanks to the prowess of Palladino and her collaborators, has an upfront, live band feel to it. She says that she didn’t want any of the songs to feel artificial. “It was intentional to keep some kind of live feeling to at least half the tracks. I wanted [the album] to have that side of the music that I love — a lot of which is made with musicians playing together in a room.”

Though Palladino clearly had the expertise to become ‘a producer’, she felt there was another hurdle to accepting the role.

“A lot of it was a gender thing, as well…You know, just [thinking] that it was a very male thing and seen as a thing that mainly men did,” she says. “And there weren’t many women producers around [the time I started making music in my bedroom]. Well, I wasn’t really seeing it anywhere. So that representation wasn’t really there as much. But now I understand that a lot of my favourite female artists, like Kate Bush, were very much in control, very much producing their music.”

With the production done, the 10 songs written for the album, and the support of her loved ones all locked in, Fabiana Palladino was ready to take on the world. But there was one more thing that stuck in Palladino’s mind.

In her early 20s, she met with a record label executive, still before a time when she’d even considered becoming an artist. They made a passing comment that they’d never sign an artist who’s over the age of 25. Was Palladino going to be well-received as a new artist in her mid-30s?

“It definitely did affect me. It wasn’t directed at me,” she says, “but there is just that thing in the industry of [being excited by] young, new artists. How often do you see someone in their 30s, female or male, being a new artist or putting out their first album? It’s just, like, very rare…There’s so much value placed on being young and fresh and cool, and not that much value placed on like experience, maturity or wisdom.

“It was just always on my mind. And I let it hold me back, for sure. And then, eventually, I just thought, ‘This is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. There’s no reason why a person of any age can’t make something creatively brilliant. I’m not going to let this stop me anymore.’

Pino still remembers that day: “I remember that person saying that…But it worked to Fabi’s advantage, I think. And that’s very much her character, too. If you tell her she can’t do something that she wants to, she’ll find a way. She’s very determined.”

As strong as Fabiana may be, she’s still found herself in a surprising position. Until she received a mysterious message, she was still just making demos in her bedroom and wasn’t considering pursuing a career as an artist.

After publishing some tracks to SoundCloud, Jai Paul reached out to her, out of the blue, asking her if she wanted to join the Paul Institute. “We didn’t really have any mutual connection at all,” she recalls. But being part of the Paul brothers’ gang has been “massive”.

“It’s just a genuinely positive group of people. We’re all just friends, really. There are definitely plans to do more music together — more releases and stuff like that. It’s just been amazing to have this community of people.”

Like Jai Paul, Palladino has faced pressure from both the music industry and loyal music fans — not least thanks to modern streaming culture and the demand for more music, more frequently. But ultimately, the time it’s taken to create the album is a key part of its appeal, with one critic calling Fabiana Palladino “a pop masterpiece a lifetime in the making.” With her debut, Fabiana Palladino has shaken off the mystique and emerged as an artist and a producer, making her music on her time.

*Retrieved from a Reddit post published in 2017