Scott Ballew

“Scott's songs are stories that go rolling through your head like little movies. You watch them inside yourself as much as you hear them. And you carry away something of value you didn’t have before. As far as I'm concerned that’s exactly what a good song should do. That and tell the truth. Scott's songs do all of this.”

- Terry Allen

“Every now and then Scotty would sneak a pretty good song in around the campfire. I never knew how serious he was about it until he sent me his most recent collection of tunes. It takes a lot of courage to open up and share your soul in a song and I’m damn sure that when folks hear his tunes they’ll be happy he did.”

- Ryan Bingham

“Stories don’t work if they’re insincere, Scott can tell stories. His whole life is a story”

- Jesse Woods

Scott Ballew was born in Austin, TX. Year 1983. He didn’t exist when the cosmic cowboy craze glittered its way through town and was an infant when Daniel Johnston was selling cassettes outside of Tower Records on Guadalupe. At the age of 30, after a blurry decade of making films and commercials in Southern California, Scott returned home to Austin. Inspired by the straightforward and slightly manic music of Michael Hurley and Townes Van Zandt, he first found a creative outlet in the form of films. Of the many projects, perhaps the most pivotal was directing the only documentary about the work of the great artist Terry Allen.

I don’t know when Scott started writing songs, but I imagine it was somewhere between Texas and Montana. He somehow plowed through the pre-highway dirt job of Willis Alan Ramsey and landed right in the middle of a Livingston Saturday Night. Scott’s commitment to narrative song and exploring the soul of a slightly older America is hitting all targets front and rear view, all the while reminding us that depression and self destruction can also be funny.

Now 37, he has peeled back another layer to reveal a poetic loner just as lost as the rest of us in this bright and burning futureworld. These songs were recorded in an old house in Lockhart, TX in the summer. It sounds like it. Unplug and drift down to 1972. It’s a long drive and something is always close behind.