Paak at the start of candid power ballad ‘Put On A Smile’. He reappears on the majority of the songs across the record, and even imparts some hard-won emotional wisdom to Mars and. Glitzy opener ‘Silk Sonic Intro’ introduces us to the record’s guest host, legendary Parliament-Funkadelic member and funk overlord Bootsy Collins (or “Bootzilla himself” as he puts it over a blast of horns). ‘An Evening With Silk Sonic’ is an album that’s been made with extraordinary care, one that seeks to avoid nostalgic trappings while still aiming for timelessness. It was time to turn half-promises into a fully-realised passion project.
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When the tour ended, the artists carried on with their respective lives until they reconnected in early 2020 after Mars listened back to the demos they made on the road three years prior. They soon agreed that they would make a collaborative record together, but refused to place a timeline on it in the hope that, over time, they would be able to alchemise a full-length album from this organic approach. Paak opened for Mars on the European leg of his ‘24K Magic’ tour in spring 2017, the pair found themselves experimenting and jamming in the studio after just a week. Yet every element feels intentionally placed: in a recent Rolling Stone interview, the duo bragged about how “dozens” of versions of this album got scrapped simply because a minor production note wasn’t right – proving that they take their craft more seriously than most. The record’s nine rich and colourful tracks delight in all-out pop hooks, lush harmonies and conversational verses that occasionally – but knowingly – lean towards musical theatre. Paak’s deliberate approach to pastiche is consistently validated by their extreme attention to detail, meaning that their debut album, ‘An Evening With Silk Sonic’, is far from a two-man recreation of a specific era. A combination of soft piano lines, swooning strings and a glockenspiel revive the sound of seminal Philadelphia soul groups such as The Delfonics and The O’Jays, who brought symphonic arrangements to the mainstream in the early 1970s.īut Mars and. Its ascendant bridge, formed from a collection of rich chord changes which meld into each other, is far from subtle in its references, but that’s part of the fun. Here was a song that showed off the pair’s intuitive chemistry with playful humour ( “If you’re hungry, girl, I got fillets”), studied musicianship and a shared crate-digger mindset. Paak first announced their collaboration with March’s ‘Leave The Door Open’ – a sumptuous single that features the former’s best vocal performance to date – it was clear that this was a team of two retro-obsessed musicians revelling in a deep admiration for one another. For a group whose members’ solo albums often seem like the work of one perfectionist mastermind, Silk Sonic are an impeccably in-sync alliance.