Sometimes, it’s not the notes you play but how you play them. At least that’s what producer Shawn Everett discovered when he was working with pop superstar Miley Cyrus on her 2025 album, Something Beautiful.
Speaking to the Dead Wax podcast, Everett begins by revealing that, at Cyrus’s request - and unlike a lot of pop records these days - the instrumental parts on Something Beautiful were recorded by a live band.
“She really likes musicians playing,” he says. “That's something that she really appreciates, she really loves that. I can't remember the discussion exactly, but that's something that she really looks forward to - the idea of people playing together, musicians, you know, in one room.”
Not just any old musicians, either: playing bass on the majority of the tracks is a certain Pino Palladino, the legendary session musician who’s added his trademark groove to albums by artists from across the genre spectrum - from The Who and Eric Clapton to Don Henley and D’Angelo.
However, Everett explains that there was one song on Cyrus’s album - lead single The End Of The World - that Palladino didn’t originally feature on: lead single End of the World.
“That one was early that we did the tracking, and he [Palladino] wasn't there that day,” he confirms. “And we had this demo bass, and it was just eights [eighth notes], you know? And the guy who played it is, you know, he's not a bass player - he's an incredible guitar player - but the bass was good, you know?”
Everett says that, throughout the production process, he continued to be satisfied with the ‘demo’ bassline and didn’t see any reason to re-record it, but something was playing on his mind.
“We were getting to the end of the album and, you know, at that point, Pino [had] played on every single track. And we kept kind of saying, like, ‘should we get Pino to come in and play bass on that song?’ And everyone kept umming and ahhing… and it was just like, why do we need to drag him down here to play eighth notes? He has better things to do than play eighth notes, you know? He's too good for that.”
The thought never quite went away, though, and so, eventually, it was put to Palladino that he could put his own spin on the song.
“We were getting to the end of the album, and we were running out of time, but it was nagging at everybody and then finally there was like a day, and we were like, ‘can you come down here and just keep playing these eighth notes?’ And then he came in, and just on the first take, I was like, ‘Oh my God. I didn't know that a person playing eighth notes could do that much. It was like the tiniest, like, ‘fracture’. I don't even know the difference - it was just so much better. And I accidentally heard a previous version about three weeks ago where it was not him, and I was just like, I cannot believe the difference. I cannot believe the difference. I just thought it would sound the same, because I'm not smart enough about bass to know the intricacies of why it would sound that much better, but my God.”
Palladino, though, certainly is smart enough - not to mention skillful enough - to be able to make the difference. Sadly, we don’t get to hear a direct comparison between the two different versions, but when you listen to End of the World, there’s a moment - the first half of the second verse - when Palladino isn’t playing, so that you can measure the impact when he is.
"You can tell that it loses its rhythm,” says Everett. “It feels, very suddenly, kind of German, like, very strict, you know? The reason I used that there was to give a very subtle dynamic shift between that bass kind of feeling a little stiff and intense. And then when it comes back to the second half of the verse, it goes back to him, and then all of a sudden, makes you move a little different.”
Sounds about right: a Pino Palladino bassline just hits different.
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