Scott Ballew has made a career for himself working in creative direction and video production. But his whole life, a love for musical storytelling lurked under his skin.
Now in his forties – following a stint in college football, a high-up position at YETI Coolers, and an ongoing corporate day job at Western retailers Tecovas – Ballew has finally opened himself to songwriting. He celebrates the release of his fourth album in four years, Paradiso, on Dec. 6 at Sam’s Town Point. However, looking back on it, his road to alt-country paradise was anything but.
Eye Tats for Eye Black
With Jimmy Buffett partying through his headphones, a middle school Ballew dreamed of a pirate life. He intended to tattoo his eyelids with eyeballs, like a seafaring looter making sure their enemies couldn’t tell if they were sleeping. He treasured Buffett’s musical tales of Margaritaville and the stories his dad shared of local Austin musicians like Willie Nelson and Guy Clark coming through the University of Texas football locker room in the Sixties.
Ballew kept a guitar in his room with a hammock he’d swapped – on-theme – for his bed. But the music didn’t come naturally, and the guitar sat mostly unplayed.
He was tall, athletic, and growing up in Austin in the Nineties – zoned for Westlake High School, a program developing a winning reputation with future NFL stars like Drew Brees – so football was “the thing to do.” Ballew stunned as a star running back at Westlake before he was recruited by the University of Washington, where he studied creative writing, and then ended up right back in Austin to be on the Longhorns’ 2005 champion team. He studied communications back home.
“I was a reluctant jock,” Ballew says. “Movies like Dazed and Confused and North Dallas Forty were maybe a wrong inspiration for us growing up, and we were the hippie football players that didn’t quite live the ‘jock lifestyle,’ but that’s certainly what took up all of our time.”
As he finished up college, Ballew got more into movies and watched No Direction Home and Dig! – two documentaries depicting the alluring lifestyle of an artist, which Ballew longed for. He packed up and set out to L.A.
“[Those films] lodged into my brain that the idea in life was to have some sort of unique experience,” Ballew says. “And so I started chasing that.”
“There Oughta Be a Law Against Sunny Southern California”
Ballew spent his twenties with wanderlust in his backpack – traveling all over, surfing in Cali, and trying to figure out what to do.
One of his best friends, fellow Austin musician Jesse Woods, joined him in California. The two were both college football survivors – Woods played at A&M alongside some of Ballew’s high school teammates. More importantly, they were both trying to leave that turf behind for more imaginative pursuits.
Ballew pursued commercial film work and managed Woods’ budding music career. As time went on though, he became addicted to drugs – the wrong side of that musician lifestyle he had romanticized, as he describes it. He went to rehab, where he first discovered the power of confessional writing (not songwriting quite yet).
The fourth step of the 12-step recovery system is noting one’s “moral inventory.” The first time Ballew did that in rehab, he wrote the things he was most ashamed of on a sheet of paper, shared it with a fellow addict, and then they burned it all into a crisp tiny pile.
“It was like the weight of the world was off my shoulders,” the artist says. “It was this real cathartic feeling that allows you to move on, and I certainly feel like [now writing] songs works like that for me.”
“And I Was Wrong/ When I Told You the Last Thing I Need/ Is Another Song”
Rehab brought the artist clarity for the first time since he was a kid. His sudden capacity to write was shocking.
“I realized all these people I idolize were amazing writers before they became alcoholics and drug addicts. … I became a drug addict and alcoholic thinking it was gonna turn me into a good writer. And the opposite happened,” says Ballew. ” But it gave me a lot to write about when I did sober up.”
As his creativity flowed, Ballew dove into making documentaries, incorporating into his work musician friends like Woods and award-winning actor and roots rocker Ryan Bingham – the latter of which later introduced Ballew to his idol, visual artist and outlaw legend Terry Allen. Ballew made a 2019 film about Allen called Everything (For All Reasons), during which Allen became like a “cool uncle” for him, modeling a healthy harmony with making art and living.
Within the same couple years, Ballew was left with a piano in his apartment from his previous girlfriend who was a musician. Learning chords on the piano opened his mind to finally visualizing songs in his own voice as opposed to guitar covers like he’d done before.
Then, just as the pandemic hit, his dad landed in a coma for three months because of a brain infection. With the world shut down, Ballew wasn’t distracted every day with traveling, filming, and editing.
“[Seeing your dad sick is] an extreme life moment for a man. But also, this time opened up for me to deal with it,” Ballew says. “I had this year window where I could just wake up and write and mess around with the piano.”
Freed by the separation from the real world, he started obsessively sending rough videos of songs he’d thought up to Allen, Woods, and anyone else who’d give him feedback. By the time his dad was out of the hospital, he had already written his full first album, Talking to Mountains.
Back to Buffett
Ballew worked with YETI for almost a decade, developing and directing commercials, podcasts, and documentaries. In 2023, the cooler company produced Ballew’s “All That Is Sacred,” a documentary on the Margaritaville mores of 1960s Key West: artistry, drug abuse, fishing, and friendships. Making the short allowed Ballew to finally debunk the artist mythology he’d chased, clearing the way for his own musical path.
“Hearing the descriptions of what these houses smelled like: wet dogs, ashtrays, old heroin, moldy beer, and sweat. When you think about it from a realistic perspective, it becomes really sad and dark,” Ballew said. “I’ve smelled those things, and I’ve seen those things. So I was able to look at these guys and their friendships in Key West from a more objective, less romantic perspective … [and see] how those guys escaped it.”
Pulling from his own experiences and the message of the film, Ballew wrote the song “All That Is Sacred” for the project. In it, he sings: “And it’s a dark dirty secret/ You can’t give it away/ I try to be patient/ I try to be brave/ And if the old things that die/ Are reborn unafraid/ I’ll let you in slowly.”
All Roads Lead to Paradiso
Ballew’s first album was about his dad; his second – Leisure Rodeo – was about himself; and 2024’s Rio Bravo was about God. In Paradiso, Ballew finally reflects on the last 20-ish years of his life, real or imagined.
The heart of the album is “Missed Connection,” performed with New Orleans’ Sam Doores. The track verbalizes the main theme of the album: that past experiences, while brief, can impart a lasting impression.
Though each song highlights a different spot he’s visited or daydreams about what could have been, Ballew is less reminiscing than he is putting that life to bed.
“Someone this weekend asked me what my dream trip would be, and I don’t have one,” Ballew says. “My dream is to stay at home, work on my art, and hang with my dog – and not have to ever get on a flight.”
Paradiso’s finale, “The Last Viking in Sweden,” visualizes the songwriter as a viking who traverses the world before finally making peace. By the end of the song, the character realizes what’s been waiting for him his whole life was back in Sweden.
“You don’t have to be a tortured person to make tortured art,” Ballew says. “All the darkness – you can channel it into a song or painting and let that go be its [own] thing. You don’t have to live that forever.”
Scott Ballew celebrates the release of Paradiso on Dec. 6 at Sam’s Town Point.