Scott Ballew
was born in Austin, TX in 1983. He didn’t exist when the cosmic cowboy craze glittered its way through town. And he was an infant when Daniel Johnston started 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 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 and musician Terry Allen, titled “Everything For All Reasons”.

Eventually Scott picked up the guitar when he got sober a few years ago. He taught himself a few chords, learned “Plastic Jesus” and some John Prine songs, and left the guitar in a corner for his friends to play. Then all of the sudden his dad got real sick and he found himself in the middle of a bad breakup, stuck at home with a piano and guitar while the world started falling apart in the spring of 2020.

Against his better judgement he started writing songs, and he wrote a lot of them. Pretty soon he was headed into an old house in Lockhart, TX to record some tunes with his friends. The resulting collection of songs became his debut album Talking to Mountains. Produced by longtime compadre Jesse Woods, the album features a host of friends from the Austin music scene including Todd Hannigan, Odessa Jorgenson, Austin Leonard Jones, and more.