Frankie Ballard Is All ‘Heartland’

You probably have already become acquainted with Ballard’s music through hits like “Sunshine & Whiskey,” “Young & Crazy” and “Helluva Life.” While the tracks give you a clear picture of the heights he is capable of reaching, the songs are only a part of his story.  That’s because Ballard is as much of a music fan as much as he is a music maker. His love for country, R&B, blues and rock ’n’ roll shines brightly.  It’s almost as if he’s absorbed the best those genres have to offer so that he could mix them into a signature sound uniquely his own.

Ballard’s third studio album, El Rio, was released in June and recorded at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, just south of El Paso.  Tracks from the LP like “Cigarette” and “It All Started With A Beer” bring more new fans into Ballard’s universe, and his cover of “You’ll Accomp’ny Me” sounds just as fresh as when Bob Seger released the song in the early ’80s.  But a love for Seger’s music is just one of the many fascinating ingredients that help shape Ballard’s signature sound. But then, Ballard was singing Seger’s songs in karaoke bars long before he played his first paying gig.

How do you select the songs for an album?

It starts with the writing process.  I’m not much of a year-round writer.  I have to go in seasons of writing. I feel that I’ve got to collect information and then I gotta go and write.  I don’t know if that’s the best thing to do. I should probably be writing all the time.

It starts with me getting serious about that.  I’ll sit down with a bunch of people I want to write with as well as writing a lot by myself.  I’m a songwriter first, I guess.  That’s the first thing I became as a musician. … It starts with that and listening to songs.  Living in Music City U.S.A., in my opinion, [I’m here with] the best songwriters in the world.

I listen to outside songs, looking for something that I’ve always wanted to say but wasn’t able to say myself. … I’m a live artist, I’m a songwriter and I’m a recording artist as well.  To be a great recording artist, I think you gotta give people the best you can give them, and people deserve the best.  Sometimes the best songs just have to win, whether you wrote them or not.

I sit down, write and listen, write and listen.  Then my producer, Marshall Altman, my A&R representative at Warner Bros. Nashville, the wonder Chris Lacy … and I sit down and make the final decisions. Then it’s, “OK. Now we have some studio time booked.  We’re going to go down and try to knock these things out of the park. … Who are the ponies? Which ones are the ones?”  We make these decisions. Ultimately, I guess it’s my decision but it takes a team to be great. … I think I have a long ways to go but every album cycle, to me, feels like a refinement process.  I’m so blessed to be doing something I love. … I feel a duty to be the best that I can be. I take it seriously and we really work hard at it.

Your new album, El Rio, was released five years after your 2011 self-titled album. What are the major differences between the two albums that you hear when comparing the two records?

As a listener I hear El Rio [being] a lot closer to what my real influences are.  It’s taken confidence to step into some of those things.  I have old country influences, I have old blues influences and I have a lot of old rock ’n’ roll influences.  I think I just didn’t have the confidence to be true to all of that when I got to town.  Maybe I felt I had to prove myself.  That’s not what people wanted to hear, some of those insecurities an artist has.  I can definitely hear [El Rio] getting closer to my combination of all [the influences].  Maybe that’s a better way to think of it, like, my “frying pan.”  I’ve got my ingredients in there.

The real, real, hardcore influences, like Stevie Stevie Ray Vaughan and Bob Seger, those ingredients are in my frying pan and this whole time since I got a record deal, I’ve been trying to make the best version of what I can make out of my frying pan.

That’s a refinement process for me.  You see how things turn out.  There’s so much learning to be done in a studio.  You’re in the studio for the first time, you’re in the big leagues down here in Nashville and there are things to be learned.  I didn’t come here as a perfect recording artist and I’m still not.  I have a ways to go and I think that you can hear that, too.  El Rio, I think it sounds like a more mature singer, a more mature guitar player, arranger.  Marshall Altman and I, this is our second album, so we’re better this time at communicating [about] what we want for the music, the musicians and everything.  You try to get better and I can definitely hear … a better quality product and that’s the direction I’m trying to head.  The next one is going to have to kick El Rio’s ass.

El Rio also sounds like a more confident album.  Is that an accurate observation?

It’s what we wanted to do.  We went to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio on the way to El Paso, Texas, and arranged songs there, practiced and rehearsed before we got to the studio in El Paso.  And we did that for a reason.  We wanted to go in and see if there was any mojo still dripping off of the walls down there.

“Cigarette,” “L.A. Woman,” “El Camino,” those were all arranged on the floor at Muscle Shoals, where Bob Seger cut a number of his memorable giant hits.  The Rolling Stones [recorded there]. 

We were a five-piece band.  We were going down to Texas trying to make some hit music with just five men.  So we put ourselves into Muscle Shoals to get a little more balls-out, to remember some of our heroes and hopefully be influenced and inspired by classic rock ’n’ roll history. We were very intentional about those things.  We were trying to crank up the volume on this thing, crank up the attitude and confidence.

Many of your recordings have a very full sound and are packed with extras like piano flourishes in between lyric lines or hand-clapping in the background.  How do you know when a record is done?  It almost sounds as if you could keep on adding textural elements until someone told you to stop.

One of the good ways to stop is appreciating space in music.  Treating air, space and nothingness within a composition with just as much respect as you treat the hi-hat or the electric guitar.  We can add, but only to a point.  Some of the air in there is what makes it feel alive and makes it feel like you can close your eyes and see it coming from a stage.  Sometimes, I think there’s too much going on.  [Going back] to some of my favorite music from days gone by and I hear the breath that Mick Jagger pulls in … before he sings the lyric.  There’s not something in the way of it. 

Marshall Altman, myself and Justin Niebank, the guy who mixed the album, we were the final three.  We were in a beautiful room here in Nashville at Blackbird where Justin was mixing.  He would get three mixes done on these songs and we’d come in and start, like, “OK, man.  I need a little more warmth out of the toms, a little more high-end. The cake has been baked and now we’re decorating.”  Just all the fine trim work, if you need another metaphor.  It’s that situation where that question is answered.  It’s not easy.  We live with them.  We have to get them to a point where we go, “Hey, man.  I think that might be it.” And then we’ll live with it overnight.  Drive around in the car and listen to it.  Come back and listen to it on the headphones.  It’s easy to get trapped in the rabbit hole and go too far.  But that’s part of the art.  You got to stick to landing.  You got to know when to hold them and known when to fold them.  I can’t give away all of my secrets but it’s an interesting time and it’s not easy sometimes to know when to close the book.

A lot of your songs sound as if they would be right at home on a radio station playing next to The Rolling Stones, John Mellencamp and Lynyrd Skynyrd.  Would you describe your music as country rock or rockin’ country?

I would say country rock sounds better.  I think, honestly, what sounds even better is heartland rock.  Heartland rock ’n’ roll, I think, is really where my wheelhouse is.  Heartland rock ’n’ roll … I lay down at night and go, “Yeah.  That’s where I want to be.” I think it’s there and everything that means.  Because that has blues in it.  That’s the thing … if you don’t have the blues in you, if you don’t have the blues influence,  it’s easy to hear. 

Chris Stapleton, yeah, he’s got it, right?  But there are certain people that don’t have that.  And [blues] combined with my love of Elvis Presley, old country and everything that happened in Memphis, the West Coast sounds of Jackson Browne and the Eagles, and all that stuff, Steve Miller, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, John Mellencamp, Bob Seger, those guys were big heroes to me.  But so was Kenny Rogers, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, and all the guys my band loved in the Outlaw Movement.

Then you put The Rolling Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Led Zeppelin and all the classic rock ’n’ roll I loved growing up in Michigan – I think heartland rock ’n’ roll is what I like to tell people.

How do you build the live show?  What goes into the process when an artist focuses on how he’s presenting the music and creating an onstage persona?

My process starts with the idea of, “OK.  Let’s get into the shoes of the fans, the patrons, the people who are coming to see us play.  They’re buying tickets, they’re getting babysitters, they’re going out to dinner, having a good time, having a couple of drinks.  They’re coming to the show, they gotta park their cars, they got to get settled in, get a couple of drinks.”

 The people have gone through a lot before they walk through the door.  They’re coming to be entertained, to let go of whatever it is that they’ve got going on in their lives.  Those things may be very subliminal, under the surface in their subconscious, but they’re there to escape into music and dance a little bit.  It’s a cathartic thing. It is for me. I go to see a band and I feel great when I leave, I feel like I’ve got some therapy.  That’s awesome.  I fully understand what their shoes feel like.

I take that with a responsibility.  I got to make sure, first and foremost, that experience is happening for them.  That’s getting your money’s worth and that’s really what the live relationship is about.  It’s sort of the same as a recording artist and a person who listens to recorded music.  It’s a similar process, maybe a little more heady.

Live, I’ve got things I gotta get off of my chest just like I do in the recording studio.   And you’re taking it and receiving it, therefore getting your stuff out.  That’s the relationship.  That’s precious to me. It’s important.  It’s a blessing to live this life, to have an audience and to have a stage.  That comes with responsibility in my heart.  I got to make sure those people are fulfilled and I’m living up to my end of the bargain, my duties in this relationship.

How do you approach creating the setlist?

I start with the original music. … I just get those down to a piece of paper. It’s most of the new album right now.  Not every song.  “You Could’ve Loved Me” is not getting played. It’s a ballad but we’re going to be working that in in 2017.  My list is concise but it’s got some new stuff on it and it’s got some stuff from previous albums.

I know about where I’m at. I know I average about five minutes a song. I’ve just been doing shows for a long time and sometimes I’ll extend a guitar solo or sometimes a song will end abruptly. … The [setlist] is a daily process for me.  I don’t live off of one setlist, I make one every night.  Time is a factor.  I’ll plug in the most appropriate, and I’ll pull from a deep list of cover songs that I know and the band knows, that we have arrangements for. Depending on where we’re at or what mood we’re in, we’ll put some of those in there.

While touring, can a song grow from being somewhat likable into a complete showstopper?

I think it absolutely does.  I think bands … underestimate how a song needs to be performed, sometimes, for its effectiveness.  If you’re talking about the songs on El Rio … I think a good example is the song “Wasting Time.”  When we first started playing that song, it was all there but the groove, the meter it was recorded at.   That groove has got to be played. … It has this energy that you wanna rush, you wanna get on top of it, but you really have to sit back as a band.  30 or 40 performances later we’re going, “Oh, my god.  This thing, that’s all it needed. It just needed those riffs for all of us to get comfortable and lean back a little bit on that backbeat and don’t rush it. 30 or 40 [shows] where you’ve been doing it and all of a sudden the band has got it so greasy and we’re so confident because we know it so much better.  Those things happen.

The live experience is totally different.  When the songs were recorded, we’re sitting down in a studio. We have a perfect atmosphere. All the microphones are perfect and what we’re hearing is almost  perfect.  Live is a different thing.  Live is supposed to be living and breathing. You’re jumping around, bending down because somebody reached out and wants to touch your hand.  Things are different.   It takes time to really feel as confident as you can. 

We rehearse a lot and that’s what rehearsals are for. Michael Phelps doesn’t just jump in the pool and start swimming.

Are there covers you and the band like to play when no one is watching, such as during soundcheck, warming up in the studio or even on the bus to pass the time while traveling?

One of them, we tried it live but it kind of went past a lot of people because it’s a deeper track and it’s got all of this guitar playing.  But we’re up there lovin’ it because it’s musical and it’s crazy, it’s a song called “Workin’ For MCA” by Lynyrd Skynyrd.  My guitar player, Eddie and I, have been playing it since Kalamazoo when we were playing bars.  We have that whole harmonized guitar part dialed in.  But for people it wasn’t what it needed to be as a cover song live.  That’s definitely one that we’ll crank up for soundcheck, just to check the sound, check the amps.  At the end of the day were still a bunch of musicians who love music and love playing like that.  So we bust that out.

Another is “Lonely Is The Night” by Billy Squier. That’s a soundcheck favorite as well.

What was the first album you ever bought?

I had a lot of great music around me.  My dad had a lot of great music so I didn’t have to buy a lot of stuff early.  It was a compact disc. … I walked into [the record store] and had about 15 of my own dollars from shoveling snow or something and I was going to buy my first CD that wasn’t my dad’s music.  It was The Baddest Of George Thorogood & the Destroyers.

Did you ever meet Thorogood?

I got to meet him at Stagecoach two years ago.  I got to meet him backstage and it was a real honor.  And I told him that story.  I said, “I was doing pushups in my room to ‘Who Do You Love,’ ‘Bad To The Bone’ and ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch & One Beer’ trying to be a big strong dude someday looking up to you.” He thought it was cool.

And you played baseball for Western Michigan University.  Did Thorogood’s songs get a lot of play in the locker room?

Absolutely. George Thorogood has no idea as to how many spins he’s gotten for me.  I think baseball did a lot for me, too, as a competitive musician.  This is the music business and business is competitive and I still definitely have that drive in me from my baseball days.  I’m thankful for it.

If you could talk to the Frankie Ballard recording his first album in 2011, what advice would you give him?

First of all, cut his hair.  Second of all, I think it would be a lot about, “Hey, you gotta be who you are.  You gotta be who you are 100 percent of the time.  An artist is at his best when he’s most honest to his real influences, what turns him on, musically.  Don’t forget that.”

Frankie Ballard’s upcoming shows:

Nov. 11 – Bradenton, Fla., Joyland
Nov. 12 – Cherokee, N.C., Harrah’s Cherokee Casino Resort Event Center
Nov. 17 – Nashville, Tenn., Exit / In
Nov. 18 – Starkville, Miss., Rick’s Café
Nov. 19 – Savannah, Ga., Saddle Bags
Nov  29 – Rootstown, Ohio, Dusty Armadillo
Nov. 30 – Saint Paul, Minn., Myth  (K102 St. Jude Fan Jam)
Dec., 2 – Las Vegas, Nev., The Foundry
Dec. 9 – Springfield, Ill., Boondocks
Dec. 10 – Dayton, Ohio, Wright State University’s Nutter Center (Appearing with  The Band Perry )
Dec. 16 – Kalamazoo, Mich., The Kalamazoo State Theatre
Dec. 17 – Kalamazoo, Mich., The Kalamazoo State Theatre
July 13 – Rhinelander, Wis., Hodag Country Festival  (Hodag Country Festival)

For more information, please visit Frankie Ballard’s website, Facebook page, Twitter feed, YouTube channel and Instagram account.