London musician Fabiana Palladino, daughter of all-time bass great Pino, has been working closely with the semi-reclusive Jai Paul for years now. Pallidino is signed to the Paul Institute label, and she and Paul released the duet “I Care” last year. Now, Palladino is getting ready to release her self-titled debut album, and she’s now shared the slinky new single “I Can’t Dream Anymore.”
“I Can’t Dream Anymore” is a smooth, glossy piece of chilled-out R&B with some serious late-’80s Lisa Stansfield vibes. Palladino wrote the song, and she co-produced it with Jai Paul. She and Paul played every instrument on the track. Here’s what Palladino says about it:
I wrote “I Can’t Dream Anymore” in a period of the first lockdown where I was staying up too late, writing songs for the album alone and the intensity and unreality of everything started to affect my sleep… I realised after a while that even when I did sleep, I wasn’t really dreaming. Everything felt very surreal, and it reminded me of when I’ve been in the aftermath of big changes, those moments in life where everything shifts and you have to reconfigure yourself.
The track has this very insular feeling at first but opens up into something more emotional and direct as the song goes on. We leant into that with the production; we wanted to make it borderline melodramatic, like a power-ballad. There’s real heartache in not being able to dream anymore, not being able to imagine a future or remember a feeling from the past, so I didn’t want to shy away from the big feelings in the lyrics.
I listened to the shipping forecast for comfort during the time of writing the album. I found it relaxing, but it was also a kind of escapism for me. The isolation I was feeling felt more romantic when I listened to it. I’d be playing this imagined, isolated version of myself out to sea, completely alone but connected to others by broadcasting my radio show from the ship late into the night, which is how I connected with Radio Caroline for the video. A theme across the album is connection and disconnection. It’s something I’m fascinated by, and the video represents it in a way which feels specific to “I Can’t Dream Anymore.”
Fabiana Palladino and directors Caroline Waxse and Josh Renaut filmed the “I Can’t Dream Anymore” video aboard the ship that housed Radio Caroline, a famous pirate radio station that’s been running for decades. Check it out below.
Fabiana Palladino is out 4/5 on Paul Institute/XL Recordings.
