Holy hell. How did I end up at Chris Ballew’s home studio?

I was supposed to meet Chris at Feedback Lounge in West Seattle one evening. We had some difficulty meeting up initially, which only prolonged my anxiety about getting to talk someone I’d admired since fourteen. Chris had been finishing up a new album with his band The Presidents of the United States of America and was, understandably, quite busy with all the things that a project like that entails. Along with a bout of the flu, and the city of Seattle coming to a halt as the Seahawks won the Super Bowl, the delays kept coming but were perfectly understandable.

Finally, a few months after our first email, the day arrived. I got to the bar 25 minutes early, only to find a bright green piece of paper taped to the door that read simply “CLOSED TONIGHT FOR A PRIVATE EVENT.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I mutter aloud, retrieving my phone from my pocket to email Chris. Again. I begin to wonder if this is getting to be too much. Maybe we should just scrap the idea… but he is quick to respond. Call me, he writes, and gives me his phone number.

I call him.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Chris. It’s Aaron.”

“This is ridiculous,” he chuckles, and I agree.

“Why don’t you just come to my house?” he says. “It’s not far, and I have a studio we can hang out in, if that’s ok.”

IF THAT’S OKAY?? IT’S BETTER THAN OKAY!

I’m not sure what happened between that offer and me arriving at Chris Ballew’s front door, but can assure you I thought a lot about how just when you want to throw in the towel, something better than you even imagined can come to the fore. He opens the door. There is an honest calmness behind the youthful glimmer in his eyes. “C’mon in!” he says.

We walk through the living room where Chris’s two children have recently finished dinner and are now absorbed in their tablet devices. I am introduced, they both stop and politely say hello.

We move on to the kitchen where we choose the evening’s beverage. From an assortment of great spirits, we settle on Hibiki, a 12 year-old blended Japanese whiskey aged partly in plum brandy barrels. (Spoiler alert – it’s delicious!) We grab ice, a pair of Mason jars, our beloved Hibiki, and head out back to his studio, a small shed – about 7′ by 10′ – in the yard behind his house. Not your standard rock star’s home studio, but Chris Ballew has never been one to follow convention.

“I built that,” he says, pointing at the diminutive workspace as we cross the yard in the moonlight. I raise my eyebrows at him. “No, I mean I actually built that. It was important that I made it with my own hands.”

He opens the door, and there’s just enough space for the two of us. It’s actually quite comforting. There’s a good energy here. And it smells like fresh wood. Chris sits on a chair in the middle of the space, and I take a seat on the make-shift, what I’ll call “prison bed,” he’s fashioned out of storage bins and a sheet of plywood on one end of the room. Against the wall opposite me is a desk with a laptop flanked by two monitors. Below them are three pieces of recording hardware, and beside the desk is one microphone and an electric keyboard. (That’s his entire setup.) An upright piano sits against the remaining wall, and we are surrounded by several two and three-stringed guitars mounted on the walls around us, his trademark.

We clink glasses.

“I have so many questions. So much I want to talk about. I need to get right into it.”

“Sure, man. Go ahead.”

“You’ve experienced something not many people get to experience. Something I personally consider to be the pinnacle of American culture: You have been parodied by Weird Al Yankovic.”

Chris laughs.

“What was that like?” I ask, wide-eyed as if waiting to hear Neil Armstrong describe walking on the Moon.

“It’s very surreal,” he says. “I’ve always respected Al’s craft and what he does. I was so into it when he did it, and the fact that he’s playing me, you know, it’s not just my band – in the video he’s ME! At that time, there were so many aspects to my life that were surreal and weird: being nominated for two Grammys, selling millions of records, having a business meeting with Madonna… the song parody was just another crazy thing to throw into the mix. But we ended up being good friends, Al and me.”

“He’s on one of your Caspar tunes,” I say, referring to Chris’s alter-ego, Caspar Babypants, a moniker he’s been using to make children’s music since 2009.

“Yeah. He’s on a song called, um…” He mumbles a melody to himself, a lyric with the song title at the end it. “Long Long Dream! He takes the solo, and there’s four of him – a bass accordion, a rhythm, and two lead accordions – and everything goes away except Al… it is a RIPPIN solo! He’s a great human being, a really nice guy. And an incredibly good listener.”

I ask Chris what it was like when things really began to take off for PUSA in the mid-90s. How he dealt with sudden and wide-spread fame. “My decisions,” he begins, “have always been based on joy in the moment. The more you rush for the reward, the further away it stretches. I always redefined what ‘making it’ meant to be attainable. To me, I was already successful when we became successful. I was already writing songs, recording them at home, putting them on cassettes, and selling them at my shows. What else do you need?”

Here’s a short list of other things Chris Ballew doesn’t need:

– 6-guitar strings (he only uses 3)
– 4-bass strings (he only uses 2)
– a bass at all! (he puts bass strings on an electric guitar body)
– a record label (he runs his own)

Which brings us to Caspar Babypants, a music project for children ages six and younger that is 100% nobody-tells-me-what-to-do-or-how-to-do-it punk rock DIY from start to finish. And it all happens in this very room.

Chris says the purpose of Caspar Babypants is to allow parents and kids to sing the same song in the same room and both be aesthetically taken care of. He is a man at war against the divisive nature of most kids music. “It’s a terrible crime against the family,” he says passionately. “You have to keep the family together; it’s about sharing experiences.”

Perhaps the most obvious example of this intention is the latest of Caspar’s seven albums: a collection of covers called Baby Beatles. A process Chris describes as “cracking open the work of a master, boiling it down to the bones, and then building it back up.”

“There’s a wonderful purity to that record,” I offer.

“A lot of little kids love The Beatles,” Chris says, “but a lot of their songs are very thick, swirling with lots of stuff going on and production… They’re filtered, and I wanted to take the filter away.”

“You’re just an upstream sonofabitch, aren’t you?” I joke. “I think you’re the only person I’ve heard who says give children less. You’re not trying to overstimulate them, you’re just trying to give them something genuine to connect to. Too many people want a reaction from children, but not necessarily a connection.”

“Exactly.”

Since June 2009, Chris has played 656 shows as Caspar Babypants, and it’s obvious that his passion for connection hasn’t dulled. He tells me about six children who hugged him today. “That’s so real. That’s a real hug from a human being,” he says, eyes welling, “they don’t have to do that. It’s so touching.”

A few years ago, Chris met the mother of a seven year-old boy who was severely autistic. He had only ever talked about or been interested in the plumbing that went from his toilet to the bathroom wall. That was his whole world. Until she put on a Caspar album. Suddenly, the boy stopped, listened for a moment, and said in a calm, matter-of-fact way, “Why that’s absurd.” And he kept listening. And he kept talking about the music. Chris is doing his best to tell me this story, but is having difficulty talking through his emotions. Describing a mother telling him things like “You gave me my son back,” is justifiably overwhelming.

“That’s what it’s all about, right?” I ask, moved by his compassion. “What else is there, really?”

“YES!” he says, emphatically. “That’s so much more important than being on the cover of a fucking magazine. Everything else is just shiny bullshit. When a family comes up to me after a show and says ‘We had a five-hour drive and your music saved us,’ I’m like THAT’S WHY I MADE IT! Thank you!”

“Is that where you find the energy to keep going?” I ask.

“I meditate and do Qigong, a basic Tai chi breathing kind of thing. That fuels me, man. Deep breathing is incredible. Done correctly, I get to a point where I don’t feel the boundaries of my body anymore, and I am connected to everything all at once.”

I take a deep breath and a sip of whiskey. Chris turns to the upright piano.

“The impulse to create is a pure thing.” He plays a warm, almost jazzy chord. “That’s it. I’m done. Nothing else needs to be done. I’ve just made music.”

He plays the chord again.

But there’s more, he goes on to say. Maybe you could record that music. And stop there. Or continue to work that music out and make it into a song. And stop there. Or continue and copy that music, and distribute it around town. And stop there. Or take it to the end and try to be Mick Jagger.

“So where is my line?” Chris wonders, rhetorically. “I feel really protective of the core impulse to create, and not ever getting to a point when the band was huge when that core is compromised or inaccessible. Pearl Jam talked about this on their 20th anniversary DVD. Have you seen that?”

“No,” I say. “I was more of a Presidents guy.”

Chris begins to tell me about a new potential relationship with music he’s cultivating that is not about duplicating it or confining it to any ideas of what a song should be. “What does that look like?” I ask.

He draws a deep breath and as he exhales, lowers his fingers onto the piano keys. It’s as if he were breathing for the instrument. He explains he’s trying to distill it all down, get as pure as possible. “I’m just using music to accompany the breathing. And that’s it.

“The world is an amazingly astounding energetic place once you tune into it. The show of the world is an incredible show. The light! The sound! You don’t really need the latest record by the hottest band. But getting to the point where you can really feel that takes a lot of time and practice – but it’s there. I can see that it’s there. Someday I feel like I’ll transcend the need to capture and trap and duplicate and repeat, and then all I’ll have is –

He presses his fingers down on the keys.

“This.”