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 If you’re a parent like me, you might at some point have hit a wall with children’s music. I deeply regret the day I introduced my daughter to “On Top of Spaghetti”, and I eventually had to ban Tom Glaser from our home.  So a few years ago when my daughter told me her new favorite artist was Caspar Babypants, I groaned. I told her to keep that music to her own space too. But one day walking by her as she was drawing to her music, I stopped cold at this song:

“Made of light. Made of light. As you grow, just know that everything thing is made of light. Made of light. All dissolves and falls into a dream .”

As far as I could tell, this song described one of the most advanced forms of meditation I’d been taught in Tibetan Buddhism. This brought me to a gradual conversion until I too came to love Caspar Babypants, the stage name of Chris Ballew.

After 19 albums as Caspar, he recently returned to a solo career. And those songs too, I found had some deeply spiritual themes. When I told my daughter that I’d be interviewing Chris, she made a squeal of delight I’d never heard from her before. This episode is dedicated to her, but I think there’s something for just about everyone in this interview with Chris, who in the nineties, head up the hugely successful band The Presidents of the United States of America.

Grammys and the Sgt. Pepper’s album

Scott Snibbe: Chris, I’m really excited to have you on the How to Train a Happy Mind podcast. It’s a particularly good day to talk about meditation and music because the Dalai Lama won his first Grammy last night.

Chris Ballew: I didn’t know that. I didn’t watch the Grammys, I usually watch it a couple days after. That is heartening.

Scott Snibbe: Age 90, Best Audiobook.

Chris Ballew: Man, I love that. I think there might be a trend of people in their fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties making music that is meaningful and helpful.

Scott Snibbe: And you’ve been nominated three times, right?

Chris Ballew: Yeah, three. In the nineties we were nominated twice as a band—The Presidents, my rock band in the nineties—and we lost to Nirvana and The Beatles. So what are you gonna do?

Scott Snibbe: The Beatles are certainly your single greatest influence, right? You listened to Sgt. Pepper’s?

Chris Ballew: Yeah, Sgt. Pepper’s is like this roadmap or blueprint. The way that album invites the listener to travel through all these different landscapes, all these different sonic atmospheres, attitudes: darkness, lightness. “Within You Without You” into “When I’m Sixty-Four” is one of the greatest transitions in the world. It’s like this palate cleanser. It’s amazing.

As a tiny child, I started really listening to it in earnest when I was about four. I just absorbed that record over and over and over. I didn’t even know there were other albums by The Beatles. I didn’t know there were other albums by anybody.

Scott Snibbe: Well, you got lucky, because it’s arguably the best album ever written and produced, right? I discovered your music through my daughter, which is probably something you hear often. She’s a true super fan.

Scott Snibbe: Samaya, you’re turning 15 in a couple months. Why is Caspar Babypants your favorite musical artist?

Samaya Snibbe: I like Caspar Babypants because when I listen to his music, it makes me feel really joyful. I feel like I can do things that I don’t really like to do, like cleaning up. It energizes me.

Chris Ballew: I love that. I always kind of hope that the Caspar Babypants music would be an anchor for people as they grow up—to connect back to an innocent, beginner’s mind, childlike approach to life. That’s nice to hear.

I always kind of hope that the Caspar Babypants music would be an anchor for people as they grow up—to connect back to an innocent, beginner’s mind, childlike approach to life.

Scott Snibbe: I’ve witnessed a number of conversations as I drive her around with her 15-year-old friends now. They’re talking about Taylor Swift, et cetera. Then they say, “What’s your favorite artist?” And she says, “Caspar Babypants.” And it’s crickets.

Walking away from rockstar success

Scott Snibbe: I want to talk to you about moments in your life when you had an inner transformation. Let’s start with your band. When you were in The Presidents of the United States of America, you sold millions of records, great music. And yet you walked away from it.

Can you talk a little bit about what didn’t feel quite right about rockstar success, and how you chose to steer your life afterward?

Chris Ballew: The roots of that experience are in my life way before the band hit it big. I was writing songs, recording them on my little four-track cassette machine, compiling them onto another cassette as a sort of album or collection, making a little cover for it, and making about 50 copies. Then going into the subway and the downtown streets of Boston and New York, playing on the street, playing in the subway, selling my little cassette.

I thought, that circuit is complete. I’ve written a song, gone through the experience of playing it live, sold it on a medium, made a little money, bought groceries, gone home. It was this perfect little circuit. I was really trying to construct a life that didn’t require validation from outside.

I was really trying to construct a life that didn’t require validation from outside.

The Presidents were just another in a long series of little bands I’d put together to keep from being bored. We didn’t have the kinds of distractions we have now, so we had to create our own. We’d challenge ourselves to rehearse, get ready, play a show. That was another closed loop that didn’t require validation from outside.

When all this validation of our talent and focus and purpose (which was to make a room full of people elevate, sing, have a great time, and participate) when that received national scrutiny, it felt like everything. It was amazing. Great. Flattering. Validating. Delicious. But also disorienting and scary. Before, we had nothing to lose. Now, we had a lot to lose.

Before, we had nothing to lose. Now, we had a lot to lose.

There was a lot of money floating around. A lot of people in shiny suits who we were making a lot of money for. Who were they? What was up with them? Did they really like us, or did they just see dollar signs? There was so much to navigate. I kind of enjoyed navigating it because I felt like I’d already achieved a level of satisfaction I could always revert to. It was like a safety net, a catcher’s mitt waiting to catch me if I decided to jump ship.

I did toy with the idea, I pitched the band members on breaking up, being like the Sex Pistols: put out the perfect record, break up, freeze ourselves in that perfect state. My thought was I’d just move on and start another little band to keep from being bored on a Tuesday.

But it’s so enticing and alluring, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. That overpowers the fight-or-flight response you’re also managing. It’s this gnarly tension between traditional success and a more sustainable, peaceful way of being. The big shift was that my son was born in 1997. I didn’t want to miss anything. I didn’t want to miss milestones. I wanted to be a regular person who watched the seasons come and go, and did it with my child.

All of that combined, plus we’d had a couple of scary experiences where shows were getting out of hand. There was a situation in Australia where somebody got crushed. They didn’t die, but they were in trouble. They were having an asthma attack, and we had to stop the show.

That wasn’t happening everywhere. We weren’t the Beatles. But in Australia, we did have to run for cars. We had fake names at the hotel. My fake name—you’ll never guess—was Paul McCartney.

Scott Snibbe: That’ll throw them off.

Chris Ballew: There’s an interesting little side note. His fake name when he had to do that back in the day was Paul Ramon, and that’s where the Ramones got their name. That’s why I chose Paul McCartney. It was a really sudden way that I broke the news to my bandmates that I was quitting. We went to a band meeting in August of ’97, and I just said, “First order of business—I quit.” And then the to-do list got real short.

I think I can speak for Dave, the guitar player. He also felt some of what I was feeling. I don’t think to the point where he would’ve raised his hand and quit, but I think there was a sense of relief.

After a long spell of journaling, I remember driving in the car and talking out loud to myself, trying to counsel myself. “You’ve gotta do it. You’ve gotta move on.” The signals coming from my intuition, my gut, my belly—whatever you want to call it—were so strong. They were just saying, “You have to move on. Keep going. Don’t sink. Swim. Paddle. Paddle faster.”

That’s kind of the breakdown of the challenging dynamics around all that stuff. Self-awareness, being in touch with the signals coming from your core, your body, your intuition. I’ve found that if you quiet down, very clear messages are presented. Being open enough to receive them is one level. Acting on them is another level, and that’s very important.

I’ve found that if you quiet down, very clear messages are presented.

It’s one of the main things I tried to give my children as a piece of self-awareness. I started saying this when they were really little: anytime you’re in any situation, check in with your body. See how your body feels. Then follow its messaging and its direction. You’ll find a minuscule, microscopic doorway. That doorway leads to the now, and your happiness.

Anytime you’re in any situation, check in with your body. Then follow its messaging and its direction.

Scott Snibbe: Such great advice.

Chris Ballew: They seem to have taken it to heart, because I think they’re finding their way. I still use it all the time. It’s been a helpful thought technology.

Freedom from “cool”

Scott Snibbe: “Quit while you’re ahead” is one of the best pieces of advice that almost nobody takes. So congratulations on managing it. I had this quote from you that I loved. You said, “I loved that feeling of being culturally completely irrelevant while simultaneously being loved and successful in connecting with an audience.” Tell me more about that.

I loved that feeling of being culturally completely irrelevant while simultaneously being loved and successful in connecting with an audience.

Chris Ballew: I think I might’ve been referring to the Caspar thing. As The Presidents were doing their thing, I continued to experiment on the side. The messaging I was getting from my system was that there was some other way to relate to music that would sustain me better than the rock band thing. The rock band thing felt very unsafe, very shaky.

The metaphor I used was that success felt like a backstage room with a velvet rope. They’d remove the rope and I’d get to go into the room. Everybody famous would be in there, and it would feel relaxing and beautiful and wonderful. But instinctively, I’d notice another door at the other end of that room with another rope. And I knew it led to another room, with another door, with another rope. It would never end. I’d just continually have to prove myself.

After years of tinkering and searching for what my intuition was telling me to look for, the music got quieter and quieter. Then I met Kate. I saw her artwork and thought, I want to make music that comes from her artwork’s planet. All the adjectives I use to describe her art, I want people to use to describe this music: innocent, bright, cheerful, full of animals and paper, handmade.

I wrote a few songs to directly accompany some of her artwork, and a cartoon light bulb went off over my head. I thought, I know what it is. It’s kids’ music. And the next thought I had was: I’m free of cool. I don’t have to prove myself as relevant in the sense of being cool anymore. That’s what that quote was about, the freedom of being immune to the pressure of culture. Being relevant, culturally cool, having hits, having singles. I didn’t do singles. I just made albums.

Meanwhile, I was playing shows and hearing feedback from parents who were using the music in the car and at home. It was working exactly how I dreamed it would: reducing stress, bringing the family together into the same room to sing the same songs. It was wonderful to be irrelevant and relevant at the same time.

It was wonderful to be irrelevant and relevant at the same time.

Selflessness and Hakomi therapy

Scott Snibbe: You’re probably aware that in Buddhism there’s this principle of selflessness, that we really become happy, fulfilled, and effective when we let go of that tight ego that makes us feel separate. I don’t know if you consciously have those feelings, but it bears on what you’re saying.

Chris Ballew: Oh, absolutely. I do a therapy called Hakomi therapy, also called Parts Work. It’s about identifying your individual little ego parts and having empathetic negotiations with each part. And man, they are so funny. Ram Dass called them “schmooze,” which I love.

I can see them. In my first Hakomi session, I could totally see them. The ongoing negotiation is never going to end with those little parts. That’s where I draw inspiration from to do the music I’m doing now, my solo stuff, for sure. But it was woven into the Caspar thing too.

The Presidents were in service to people, we were helping a rock club full of people elevate, helping lighten the tone of the musical landscape with silliness. But with Caspar, I felt like there was a deeper service, relieving tension for tired parents felt elementally important.

Kids react to parents’ stress from a super young age. I found this out about myself and my parents. There was friction in the home I grew up in—nothing dangerous—but to my little nervous system, it challenged my sense of safety completely. I didn’t understand it or have any way to deal with it at the time because I was tiny. Later I dealt with it and realized that even manageable outbursts caused by stress from parents get absorbed by children in a very deep, cellular way.

The Caspar thing had that aspect to it, hoping to derail or assist when things got stressful for families. I would work on a Caspar song, throw a bunch of ideas into it, then play it and imagine a family in a car in August in 95-degree heat. They’re all hungry and tired and mad, and they all have to pee. Then I’d ask, “Is this song going to help?”

Inevitably, I would remove the banjo and the mandolin and the tambourine. I was really laser-focused on being in service, an assist for parents.

Scott Snibbe: I heard you give this advice to parents: first show your kids who you really are, but you need to figure out who you are. Something like that?

Chris Ballew: I think it would be: help your kids understand who they are, what they prefer, what they want and don’t want. But in order to do that by example, you first have to discover who you are, what your preferences are, what you do and don’t want. Mostly by example (by making your choices) they’ll learn to get in touch with their own inner directive and let that help them choose at all the forks in the road that will be presented. That’s the longer version.

Scott Snibbe: In a way, that’s all our jobs on Earth, right? To figure out who we are. You managed to do it. What’s your advice to people about how to do that? There are even more forces now against getting to know yourself.

Chris Ballew: Yeah, that’s true. One thought technology that works for me is remembering that the current darkness in the world is also amplifying the light. So many conversations have been accelerated by the vitriolic darkness we’ve had to deal with. Over the course of human history, light and dark just dance. They pulse, shrink, expand. They’ll never stop dancing. We’ll never protest our way to complete peace. It’s not attainable.

One thought technology that works for me is remembering that the current darkness in the world is also amplifying the light.

So my advice would be: focus on what makes you happy. Focus on your bubble. Who can you influence? Who’s inside your sphere of influence, and who’s outside of it? Allow what’s outside to fall away. Focus on what’s inside. If everybody did that, those bubbles would all touch each other and hook up and make a big old bubble net.

Silliness and beginner’s mind

Scott Snibbe: It’s all made of individual relationships. You use humor to an extraordinary extent. I had a great quote from you: “Silliness is a byproduct of peace and happiness and enlightenment.” Of course I love that, as someone who’s interested in Buddhism and the ideal of enlightenment. Tell me more about that: the benefits of silliness and how that’s infused your life and work.

Silliness is a byproduct of peace and happiness and enlightenment.

Chris Ballew: It’s beginner’s mind. One of the reasons I focused on zero- to five-year-olds with Caspar Babypants—especially the zero- to two-year-olds—is that they’re like little Buddhas. They’re enlightened. They’re already there. We learn how to name things, and eventually if somebody says, “Draw a tree,” you draw what you think a tree looks like, not what the tree actually looks like. And that’s a loss.

Beginner’s mind, to me, means I look at a chair and I don’t just see a chair. I see a shape. I see the abstraction of what a chair is. Then I can pretend it has a personality, emotions. I’ll write a song about a chair, “Don’t Sit on Me” or something. That openness, that looseness, is where silliness lives.

Scott Snibbe: You tell a great story about when you were interviewing different labels to sign with. At Madonna’s label, Maverick, you got to talk to her. You didn’t end up signing with her, but she warned you that you were never going to achieve the level of success you deserve because you’re funny.

What’s the problem people have with being funny, if it’s so powerful and beneficial?

Chris Ballew: Specifically, she said, “You’ll never receive critical acclaim for your craft.” The success level was always there. I think she was trying to help us achieve greater success by telling us that if we’re fun and funny, which she was too. That early ’80s dance music before she got serious, it was bubblegum fun. That kind of thing isn’t respected.

The craft of making something fun isn’t treated the same way. Look at Weird Al Yankovic, he’s insanely talented. And you could argue he’s bucking that philosophy because he’s universally loved. He’s our fearless leader into the world of silliness.

The Origins of “Made of Light”

Scott Snibbe: I saw a lot of connection between my own experience and education in certain types of meditation (mostly Tibetan Buddhist meditation) and “Made of Light.” That’s what really drew me to go much deeper into your work. Can you share what motivated that song?

Chris Ballew: As I was doing the Caspar thing, the way I make records is that I’m always working on a big batch of songs. It’s this huge well, and I’m constantly listening, making notes, moving things around, tweaking as I go. When it comes time to make a record, I skim the cream off the top of that barrel and release the most finished, best stuff. Then I keep tinkering with what’s left.

Over time, that barrel started to fill up with a lot of mellow songs. I design the albums to move from high energy to low. You put it on, it grabs the kids’ attention, then pretty soon I’m telling stories, then things start slowing down, and eventually you get a lullaby… and you’re asleep. It’s sort of sonic narcolepsy I’m trying to induce in children.

I realized I had way more lullabies than I could use—maybe one or two at the end of an album—so I made two lullaby records. In that batch were these more esoteric, broader songs. “Made of Light” was one of those.

Scott Snibbe: Do you have formal meditation training? Did that song come out of meditation training or a spontaneous experience?

Chris Ballew: The roots of that way of being go back to college. I would have these weekends—literally the entire weekend—where I’d put on a Brian Eno album, either Music for Airports or Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, and just listen to it. Other than leaving my room to get something to eat, for 48 hours I would just sit there.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I just knew I needed this. I needed to be alone with the music, be quiet, say nothing for two days. I was doing a meditation retreat and had no idea.

I needed to be alone with the music, be quiet, say nothing for two days. I was doing a meditation retreat and had no idea.

Later, I started deep breathing. A lot of my relationship with meditation—and Qigong, which I did for quite a while, and now yoga and stretching—is instinctive. Back in college, I just got the message: you need to shut up and be quiet for two days. Then later the message was: you need to deep breathe. You need to move.

My wife and I discovered Qigong maybe 15 years ago. We started doing a simple four-set routine we found on YouTube. It was immediate: this is better than drugs, better than alcohol, better than music, better than anything.

It was immediate: Qigong is better than drugs, better than alcohol, better than music, better than anything.

Over the years I’ve just followed my intuition: being curious, listening to Alan Watts and Ram Dass while I move. That accelerated things. Ram Dass, at his best, feels like an existential stand-up comic. He’s got the silliness dialed in. He has these quick slogans that encapsulate ideas so beautifully. That inspired me to come up with my own.

It’s all been a hodgepodge. I took one Qigong lesson in Mexico. I have a physical therapist who helps me with movement. But mostly it’s intuitive. I follow the signals.

Using music to shift your emotions

Scott Snibbe: I think you said something specific happened in your meditation practice maybe four or five years ago, with respect to this “Made of Light” experience?

Chris Ballew: I can’t think of one specific experience. The art I make is kind of like totems, ideas that come to me in meditation states. Some of the songs are like sonic little totems, reminders for me. I have a song called “Step After Step” on one of my solo records. It’s this little chant: Step after step, all I can do is take step after step, all I can do.

When I get anxious, I actually sing it to myself. There’s definitely a percentage of songs I write that are little notes to self, to recenter.

Scott Snibbe: Music’s the only medium that can instantly change your emotions. You don’t always walk up to a painting and suddenly get excited. A lot of my friends are monks and nuns in Tibetan Buddhism. They have a vow against singing and dancing, making music, attending concerts. Every one of them breaks that vow.

Can you talk about how you use music to change your own emotions and others’?

Chris Ballew: With the music I’m making now, I imagine someone having a very internal experience: headphones on, lying back. I call this new music “pop cosmic” because it has pop song craft, but there’s always something meditative and repetitive in it. The chord progression might never change, but what’s on top shifts and has dynamics.

I think about a person having an internal journey, like I did with Sgt. Pepper. Making the music is thrilling. I hope people don’t take this the wrong way, but I feel like a god. I feel like a creator. Out of nothing, I’m making something that has no weight, no dimension. When I’m working on songs, time evaporates. I’m trying to help people experience that same evaporation of time while I experience it making the music.

When I’m working on songs, time evaporates. I’m trying to help people experience that same evaporation of time while I experience it making the music.

Craft, flow, and hard work

Scott Snibbe: The level of craft in some of your songs is extraordinary. I’m really blown away by the writing and the production. I wanted to ask you how long it takes to make a great song, and how hard it is. You get lost in a flow state, but it’s also a lot of work to finish one of these songs, isn’t it?

Chris Ballew: It can be. The beautiful thing is every one of them is different. There’s a song on the second Caspar album called “$9.99,” about a little stuffed bear. I was in the studio, got thirsty, went inside to get something to drink, opened the fridge, and the entire song downloaded into my head, completely finished. It took less time to think about than it did to play it. I closed the fridge without getting anything, went back out, and recorded the version that’s on the record in about ten minutes.

Sometimes it’s like that. And sometimes it’s a real struggle. I’ll work on a song that’s fundamentally flawed, but there’s one little bit in it. I’ve found that even in failures there’s a tiny shred of DNA that’s pure, trying to become something great. The challenge is letting my ego drop and listening to my own music fearlessly. Saying, “Okay, 99% of this song is a failure,” even if it took days and I worked forever on that guitar sound.

Given time, I forget about the effort. I just get honest about what’s working and what’s not. I also have four co-producers who listen at a certain stage and give me notes.

What Do You Find?

Scott Snibbe: I wanted to talk to you about my daughter’s favorite song. I don’t know if you remember it, “What Do You Find.” I’m going to play a clip of her and her reaction to it.

Samaya Snibbe: My favorite Caspar Babypants song is “What Do You Find?” I like it because there are all these really cool images he puts in my head of all the animals. It’s just such a happy, joyful song, and it puts these really funny images in my mind. I would never think of an anemone thinking of ping pong and clocks.

Scott Snibbe: You’ve said you like to make songs that work for three-year-olds and 33-year-olds. When we were listening to that song, I told her what I like about it is that it reminds me of the hard problem of consciousness. There’s this famous paper, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by David Chalmers. He says that’s the thing we can never understand about consciousness, what it’s like to be a bat.

This song, in the most beautiful, playful way, asks those questions. Do creatures have consciousness? What’s it like to be them? I don’t know if those ideas were in your head, consciously or unconsciously, when you wrote it.

Chris Ballew: Absolutely. I’m an anthropomorphizer. I’d even say, “What do you find in a chair’s mind?” or “What do you find in a lamp’s mind?” But yes, it was a genuine, silly curiosity. First to wonder: what’s going on in a jellyfish mind? And do they wonder about us?

Walt Whitman and Bubble Rap

Scott Snibbe: One other thing about my daughter, she started saying, “Walt Whitman has a non sequitur,” constantly around the house. And also, “the hustle and the bustle of the concrete jungle.” I was like, where are you getting these things? It turned out it was from your song “Bubble Rap,” this great rap you wrote. I’ll play a clip of her talking about that.

Scott Snibbe: What did you like about that particular part of “Bubble Rap”?

Samaya Snibbe: I like it. It’s kind of unexpected to have something yell, “Walt Whitman!”

Scott Snibbe: Did you know who Walt Whitman was when you heard that song?

Samaya Snibbe: No. I actually looked him up after that.

Scott Snibbe: Oh, what did you learn?

Samaya Snibbe: A poet. He liked to say “blades of grass.”

Chris Ballew: I’ll tell you where that came from. There was a band back in the ’90s called The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. I don’t remember if it was on Extra Width or Orange, but at one point John Spencer just yells, “Walt Whitman!” I thought that was so funny. So here I am using the Sugarhill Gang as a template to do a rap called “Bubble Rap.”

Scott Snibbe: A lot of your songs make me update my daughter’s music education. I said, “You know, there’s this band, the Sugarhill Gang—one of the very first rap songs.” And we went and watched it.

Chris Ballew: There you go. I love that. That’s actually an interesting aspect of the Caspar thing, too—and we did this in The Presidents—sampling different genres. In The Presidents we had our rock songs, funky songs, country songs, ballads. The Caspar thing has been fantastic because I get to emotionally sample all the music.

Connecting with yourself

Scott Snibbe: I’ve heard you talk about your current phase as a solo artist, that it came from being alone, just playing, not recording, just enjoying what you do. Many of my friends have gone on very long meditation retreats, three-year retreats. When I asked one of them what the result was, they said there was a big shakeout period that was rough. But at the end, they learned to become their own best friend. A lot of people say meditation is about learning to become your own best friend.

A lot of people say meditation is about learning to become your own best friend.

Can you talk about rolling into your solo career and connecting with yourself in the last couple years?

Chris Ballew: During the pandemic, I had to cancel all my Caspar Babypants shows. The immediate feeling I had when I realized that was relief. I saw that deep down I had been needing a break. I did 1,247 Caspar shows in ten years. Toward the end, I was packing them in, just one after another. I needed a break, and the pandemic came along and offered me this amazing pause.

So I decided to really take advantage of the shutdown and shut myself down, to reset. Out of that stillness, things started to shift. There was a song on one of the last Caspar albums, which I put out during the pandemic, “Supersonic Motorcycle.”

Scott Snibbe: Samaya loves that one. That might be her second favorite. It’s really good.

Chris Ballew: Thank you. That’s a true story. My neighbor in West Seattle—before we moved to the island—had this really fancy motorcycle. He’d turn it on and rev it to warm it up, and the whole house would shake. I did not like that. So I wrote that song about it. To record it, I went out and bought a distortion pedal. I hadn’t used distortion in 12 years because it wasn’t part of the Caspar palette. I plugged in this fuzzy distortion pedal and thought, “Oh, distortion. I remember distortion.”

Suddenly this whole world of music I used to make—heavy, repetitive, distorted, groovy—came flooding back into my creative factory. Lyrically and thematically, being alone, being quiet, doing Qigong every day, listening to Ram Dass during the shutdown—all of that nurtured these perspectives about existence, consciousness, death, birth, matter, light, the why of existence. Those started bubbling up as little slogans, little ideas, song titles, perspectives.

“Truth and Dare” and Cycles of Life

Scott Snibbe: I wanted to ask about a couple specific songs. On Truth and Dare there’s a song called “Feedback Loop.” Beautiful song. It relates to a different theme than that light expansiveness. This feels more about impermanence and the cycles of life. You mention love: a circuit that is loving and complete. Can you talk about what love means to you in a song like this?

Chris Ballew: I think I was tapping into the idea of interdependence. In ecosystems, if you take the wolves out of a park so they don’t kill the rabbits, you set off a rollercoaster ride of imbalance. The song is asking the listener to remember that although things appear destructive or violent in nature, maybe you can look at the loving relationship between cordyceps and an ant. The cordyceps infects the ant, makes it climb high, release spores, and the poor ant’s experience of being an ant is over.

But there’s a marriage there. A cohesion. A melding together of two entities that creates a new reaction. That reverberates outward and, who knows, maybe prevents a volcano from erupting somewhere. It’s about trusting interdependence. Even if it looks ugly, it’s still an act of love.

It’s about trusting interdependence. Even if it looks ugly, it’s still an act of love.

Scott Snibbe: This song seems to touch on the emotional ups and downs we feel as problems inevitably occur in life—fear, loss, anger—and maybe how we can grow through them.

Chris Ballew: I love that song because it’s really a sonic totem, a sonic talisman, a sonic worry stone that I use. It’s the idea that existence can be boiled down to problem, solution. I breathe in and I have a problem. What do I do? I breathe out. Solution. On an elemental level, we’re problem-solutioning whether we know it or not.

Scott Snibbe: So this is your mantra. For people who don’t know, a mantra is a phrase you repeat that evokes a certain quality in yourself. I use a lot of them because I’m a Tibetan Buddhist, Om mani padme hum, the mantra of compassion. But you made up your own: “Problem, solution.” That’s your mantra.

Chris Ballew: Many years ago when I moved to Boston, I lived with a Zen Buddhist who chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. I did that for a while. It didn’t resonate with me. I’m too creative, I like to make up my own. I do make up nonsense words sometimes during meditation. But “problem, solution” is something I use daily to calm myself and allow things that seem chaotic to become organized. It’s like Tetris. You take chaos, organize it, clear it out.

“Woods Behind My Home”

Scott Snibbe: I wanted to roll out this episode with my favorite Caspar Babypants song, if that’s okay, “Woods Behind My Home.” I want to ask you about it because it’s about imagination and joy. The production is insane. That was the song where I really started listening closely.

My daughter said, “Oh my God, this song is so incredible.” The effects, the music, the processing, you bring each little episode to life. It reminded me of Peter and the Wolf. I think a lot of us listened to that as kids, how music can paint images.

Chris Ballew: I love that you picked that song. That’s exactly right. It’s totally about a memory from being a child. The house I grew up in had woods behind it for most of my childhood. Eventually they were developed and turned into houses. But that little strip of woods, it wasn’t big at all, maybe half an acre, maybe an acre. But it seemed endless.

We found a weird little shed in there. Some old linoleum. It felt like something used to be there but had disintegrated. That song is absolutely about the sensation of being a little kid and fantasizing about what else was going on in the woods behind my home. The Peter and the Wolf reference is dead on. I thought, I’ll take each verse and make it musically support the characters and theme of that verse. That song took a long time to make. At the end, I bring all the instruments back in.

I grew up listening to Peter and the Wolf and loved how instruments were used to spark your imagination and make something come to life. So, thank you for acknowledging that.

Scott Snibbe: Thank you so much, Chris Ballew, for taking the time to talk about music and meditation, and for being really vulnerable. You shared a lot of sensitive personal things that I think will inspire people to get to know who they really are. Thank you.

Chris Ballew: I appreciate that. I really do. I like having a platform to link intention and spirituality to creativity, because I think a lot of people are focused on success. There’s a way to relate to your creativity that’s about attaining the highest form of satisfaction right now, without any external systems. That’s where you need to go.

Scott Snibbe: Thanks a lot, Chris.

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