100% of record sales will be donated to Santa Fe Community Foundation as part of El Rey's Musician of the Month program!

Introducing Scott Ballew’s debut album “Talking to Mountains,” now available as a 12” LP.

Includes a 24-page booklet featuring album lyrics with artwork by Scott Ballew.

Standard Black LP

"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." - Austin Leonard Jones