David Ball

DAVID BALL INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTION.
ALL QUOTES BY DAVID BALL.

It’s funny but I don’t see many of the faces of the people I used to play for in the bars and honky-tonks now that I’m on tour. It just doesn’t work that way. A new face is a new face and that’s all I ever see on tour these days are new faces. It’s always a brand new experience for me to be on stage every night.

Years ago when I toured on my own, before I got a record deal, I mostly bounced around in Texas and Louisiana and way out in different parts of the country. On this tour with Dwight, I’m playing in some of the more urban areas. It’s very different so there again I’ve been out touring nationwide for about two or three years.

So far its not the same old circuit that I played years ago that’s for sure. My hardcore fans, they’ll love my new record, I’m sure. Because I have played a lot of this stuff in concert before.

My music has a lot of steel and fiddle, things like that, so I think that my music is just rooted in that country sound.

I hear the same thing in Dwight’s music, we just have a lot in common as far as what we do musically and what music we listen to and what we like. I hear the same thing in George Strait’s music and Alan Jackson’s music. I guess it’s just called country music. I’ve been doing this for a while, and I knew even before thinking problem came along that through all my years playing the country dance halls in Texas that one day something was going to happen with my music.

Back then it was just that audience back in Texas, that liked my music. I was just glad when thinking problem made it nationwide. As far as my success with that record changing me and the way I am, who knows, that hasn’t happened yet, but who knows what tomorrow will bring. I was playing shows and after the show I started noticing young guys, I mean fifteen and sixteen year olds coming up to me as I was getting on the bus. After the show was over and all the autographs and t-shirts were done and sold, here comes this kid running across the parking lot carrying a picture wanting to talk to me right before I got onto the bus to ride to the next city. It happened time and time again. They’d want that picture signed they wanted to have it autographed and they were looking to find out from me how to write a real country song. The impact my first album had on them was great. I never really knew there was a lot of young folks out there who wanted to learn how to write real country music.

Prior to that, most of my audience had been older, drinking age you know? They liked to dance, that was really my audience back then. I mean when I played the dance floor was full. I mean now, here’s this 16-year-old kid, and this kid was really into how to write lyrics and how to write songs. He knew all about the proper ways to do things. And this happened all over the South, Georgia, Louisiana, it was amazing. That experience was new to me. I never thought that would happen.

When I was working with Alan Shamblin, he wanted to know what was like, and so when he wanted to write the song with me he sort of pulled all of what I just told you out of me and we sort of then just wrote the song. Shoot, David Ball did not come from a conference table out of a record company, that’s not my background.

I write my music so it’s really what I believe in. It’s a soul thing for me. It’s real. It’s me.

I mean, I write this stuff, so it’s really what I believe in . However frivolous is can get. I like a silly lyric as well as a heavy one. People like to have a good time and so do I.

Sometimes people can get pretty serious, but that’s show biz. I’m not really the glamorous type. I like to get with the people, I don’t want to be apart from them.

Sometimes TV shows or concerts, just due to the circumstances, they tend to separate you from the fans. That’s why in my song, ‘Put Me On No Pedstal’. That’s what I mean.

Now when you talk about radio and stuff like that, I think is would be a shame to have the country to be so far removed from their audience and their people. That’s what really would be a shame. Those people drive the music. It’s not a performance, it’s a real sharing. You get up there and you sing to them. There’s no tricks and hype. Which is what’s refreshing about country music as opposed to pop.

Sometimes you can look at a pop singer and you wonder if the guy’s even human,with all the makeup and dressed up. Some pop singers look like they’re trying to be an alien. What’s refreshing about country is that it’s a real human experience and a real connection. That’s what I feel is important about country music. I’m just real comfortable with what I do. Who is to say, I can’t predict where country music is going or anything like that. I hear some good stuff on the radio and I hear some bad. Shoot, who’s to say. I’m just a singer.

There’s a lot George Jones and Ray Price, a lot of country music from the fifties and early sixties. I kind of went back in my collection, you would not find any seventies rock, I was never a fan of that music. I hear seventies rock sometimes on the radio and it reminds me of why I went back to the older country music. I love Lefty Frizell. There’s a lot of folk music in my record collection.

When I was in high school I was really involved in a folk band. Ian and Sylvia was really my big influence in high school. They were a folk band who just did everything. They did cowboy ballads and old Scottish folk ballads and I was a huge fan of theirs. They were a folk duo, she sang and he played guitar and sang. They would cover everything. The reason I create is that I love words and music and when you put the two together it’s a lot of fun. It’s also very satisfying. Sometimes you walk around and its almost like there is a hole right in the middle of you. Then you sit down and put something down on paper and it just sort of fixes things.

Creating is just a great thing to be able to do and I really enjoy it. It’s something that I learned how to do. Its very much a craft. When I was a little boy, these songs would just kind of fall on me. Back when I was in high school, I would just wait for a melody. I’d be just in the woods goofing off and a melody would just hit me and a lyric too, and I would just go with it. I started seeing that my songs back then lacked a certain something, a certain strength and I started hearing on the radio and through old records some songs coming out of Nashville that I really liked. It was the way that music did it, and I just thought that the songs had a lot of weight to them. By this time I was about twenty years old in South Carolina or in Texas.

When I go to write a song, sometimes I’ll write the song and I won’t finish it, so every opportunity I get, even if it’s right in the middle of it, sometimes, BAM, the rest of the song will just happen. I’m not always necessarily able to always write what I think I ought to write, I try to keep an open mind. I try not to follow a formula. I don’t write a song every day. I’m also not the kind of guy who can get up at 9 o’clock and practice song writing.