Glen Ballard, ‘Jagged Little Pill’ and ‘Man in the Mirror’ Songwriter, Explains Why Artistry Matters More Than Making Hit Songs
Record producer and songwriter Glen Ballard’s philosophy about making music has served him well over the last four decades, winning him six Grammy Awards, a place in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and, on July 11, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
There are very few questions about music that he can’t answer. You can ask him about his career as a pop songwriter and producer, which stretches from No. 1 singles for Michael Jackson and Wilson Philips to radio staples by the Dave Matthews Band and No Doubt. You can ask him about the qualities he identified when he met then-little-known artists like Katy Perry and Alanis Morissette, shepherding their early careers. You can ask him about jazz — he wrote and recorded more than 60 original jazz songs for the Netflix series “The Eddy” — and you can certainly ask him about theater: the Olivier Award-winning musical adaptation of “Back to the Future,” which Ballard composed with Alan Silvestri and an in-progress opera based on “House of Cards.”
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Just don’t ask him how to write a hit song.
“I never try for hits,” Ballard says simply. “A lot of what happens when you’re a songwriter trying to make it in the pop world is that you write songs that you think can be hits. And you end up writing a hundred songs that are designed to be hits, but that’s all they’re designed to be. And when you do that, you deprive yourself of exploring other outlets that, in fact, might even become hits if you allow yourself to go into that intuitive creative mode.
“So I try to maintain an open mind from the beginning of any idea, then just put my hands on the Ouija board and let it spell it out for me,” he says.
A Mississippi native who arrived in Los Angeles in the 1970s, Ballard cut his teeth as a songwriter and producer for Quincy Jones in the ’80s. Writing songs for artists as diverse as George Benson, Teddy Pendergrass and George Strait, he scored his first No. 1 with Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror,” later penning two more chart-toppers for Wilson Phillips — “Hold On” and “You’re in Love.” But it was in the mid-1990s that Ballard became one of the most celebrated songwriter-producers of the era thanks to his work on Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill.” He produced and co-wrote every song on the 1995 landmark, which eventually sold more than 30 million copies and won the pair album of the year honors at the Grammys. Work on platinum-selling albums with Aerosmith, the Dave Matthews Band and No Doubt soon followed.
What’s perhaps most remarkable about Ballard’s run as a hitmaker is just how radically different all of those projects are from one another. Aside from a certain level of musical sophistication, there’s no obvious blueprint for a Ballard-written song, and no conspicuous sonic stamps that make his production work immediately identifiable. Per Ballard, that’s largely by design — “I don’t have a formula, everything I do is done on a bespoke basis” — although there are certain signatures you can find if you look hard enough.
“I have very little formal musical education, but I was always fascinated by the difference between French music and German music,” Ballard says. “The whole-tone scale of French music was always more interesting to me than the diatonic scale, because it never resolves. That’s always been my approach to music, trying to use the notes and the colors that are in between the primary ones. And if I can get away with putting some of that stuff on a pop record, I feel like I’ve committed a beautiful crime against boredom.”
From bottom left, Dave Stewart, Bruce Joel Rubin and Glen Ballard with the cast of “Ghost: The Musical” outside Abbey Road Studios.
Talk to composer Silvestri (Ballard’s repeat collaborator ever since they worked on the Grammy-winning 2004 song “Believe” from “The Polar Express”), and he’ll tell you that Ballard’s vast intellectual curiosity is a key ingredient in his success. For example, Silvestri remembers reaching out to Ballard to gauge his interest in co-writing a song for Robert Zemeckis’ film adaptation of “Beowulf” and finding him more than familiar with the source material.
“I called up Glen and said, ‘Hey, Bob’s going to do “Beowulf,” and we think there might be a song possibility, maybe an end credits piece,’” Silvestri remembers. “At which point, on the spot, Glen started reciting ‘Beowulf’ in the Old English. Not even in the English-English. The Old English. So that tells you something about who we’re dealing with here.”
Over the past dozen or so years, Ballard’s multidisciplinary ambitions have come to the fore. Though he maintained a lifelong interest in musical theater — he proudly notes he directed his high school theater’s production of “Once Upon a Mattress” — it wasn’t until 2012 that he finally made it to Broadway, co-writing the music for “Ghost.” He reunited with Silvestri to write “Back to the Future” shortly after, while continuing to develop his longtime passion project “The Eddy.” The two productions kicked into gear almost simultaneously, with Ballard decamping to France for the better part of two years to shoot “The Eddy,” all the while “Back to the Future” was readying its debut at the Manchester Opera House in the U.K.
Silvestri, like most of Ballard’s past and present collaborators, takes pains to stress Ballard’s ability to create warm, no-drama creative environments even amidst the chaos of production deadlines and ticking-clock studio sessions.
“He understands the horticulture of creativity: the way it breaks ground, grows, blooms and produces fruit,” Silvestri says. “And he knows that you need time and a nurturing environment for it to do that. That’s what makes him such a world-class producer.”
“I learned that from Quincy Jones,” Ballard says. “He was a perfect example of how to behave in the studio: always encouraging, always embracing, lots of food, the right vibes. When we worked with Michael [Jackson], he hated the air conditioning, so it was always 90 degrees in the studio — we just sat there sweating, but Michael loved it. Because you realize it’s not about anything else but the artist. It’s about their comfort level, and their ability to reveal something that they might not have otherwise, and if you don’t get them to a safe place, you’re not gonna get it.”
He continues, “I’ve worked for tyrannical producers before, and it’s always like ‘You’re killing the vibe, man!’ And that’s the worst thing you can do, because we’re in the vibes business.”
Amidst “Back to the Future’s” runaway success and with work underway with composer Mason Bates (who won a Grammy for his opera “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs”) to develop Netflix series “House of Cards” into a modern opera, Ballard’s muse has led him to pastures far afield of the pop charts. Does he sometimes feel disconnected from the current state of TikTok-driven pop hits? He laughs: “I think that every day!” He reserves his real ire, though, for the rising specter of AI-assisted songwriting, which he likens to “recombinant gene therapy, where there’s this new organism that kinda sorta reminds you of your uncle, only it isn’t your uncle … and you’re not getting paid for it.”
So, what’s the alternative to the growing threat of synthetic soullessness in popular music? For Ballard, it’s all about staying true to his original principles.
“I don’t really reference the market all that often,” he says. “If you’re a real artist, that’s a big mistake. And I’m talking about being a real artist, though, not a commercial artist. I try to be both, but I’m a real artist first. People who work with me know that — I’m gonna go for it, and I’m also going to try to take the audience with me. But I’m not going to do a formula. If you want that, don’t come knocking at my door.”
WHAT Glen Ballard receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
WHEN 11:30 a.m., July 11
WHERE 6253 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood
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