Excavated from Mac Miller’s 2014 archives, Balloonerism seeks to invite listeners into a dreamy, drug-induced sonic experience. The album haunts listeners with its nearly untouched structure and stories that eerily contextualize the late musical mastermind.
This album stands with the utmost intention and takes a form much larger than any traditional album. Balloonerism is the soul within Mac that continues to live on; The poignant and soul-stirring masterpiece that illuminates his timeless ingenuity.
Nearly Unpolished
We’ve received many projects from the Mac Miller estate despite his unfortunate death in 2018, including Faces, Circles, and Watching Movies with the Sound Off. Those efforts aside, Balloonerism feels pivotal. The project is a collection of jam-session tracks excavated from Mac’s 2014 projects.
Nearly untouched, aside from track sequencing, the album was released to the public in its natural form. This is well-applauded considering many posthumous releases turn out to be the artist’s estate draining their archived work for capital gain. However, Josh Berg, Mac’s engineer, released only what he knew Mac would have wanted.
In a recent Instagram post promoting the release of Balloonerism, Berg comments with a weighted heart:
I have loved this album so intensely since the moment it was created and it has haunted me ever since… They [tracks] were each finished in a day or two, the bulk of them in the first two weeks of March 2014. Nothing was added or removed.
– Josh Berg, Mac Miller’s Musical Engineer
Without careful deliberation or respectable motives, posthumous releases can fail to preserve the artistry of the creator. But Balloonerism defies that, and not only captures Mac but illuminates the reigns of his inner workings that listeners never got to see. It’s more than an album; it’s a resurrection of a musical soul; a philosophical and painful experience.
Chasing Highs
The album traces the outline of a story, each track acting as a microcosm of one larger experience. When studied closely, Balloonerism could be seen as the tracing of a drug-induced high. It follows the chase, the high, the come-down, and the supposed ‘ego-death’, or death of self. “DJ’s Chord Organ” is the first spiritually ambient track of the project. Ears are swallowed by the held organ chords that are eventually joined by a muffled drum stutter.
Cole Cuchna, host of the Dissect Podcast, explains in his incredibly detailed Balloonerism episode, that the ‘DJ’ is Daniel Johnston, an American singer/ songwriter and one of Mac Miller’s idols. The organ we hear in the intro that bleeds into the rest of the track is Johnston’s organ being played by Mac in a studio session.
Featured on the track is one of Mac’s close confidants, SZA. She gives listeners their first taste of the drug-influenced composition of Balloonerism. ‘Cocaine is ruthless’ echoes through the track as SZA takes us through the story of a drug-using insomniac. Her feature, like others on the project, was not added before the release, but recorded within the two-week stretch that Mac took to create the album in 2014.
Faded to Invisible, Famous to Miserable
Picking up at “Do You Have A Destination?“, Mac gets into the reality of the high; what it means, and how it parallels with fame. ‘Went to sleep faded, woke up invisible’, oscillates with ‘Where are you going?’; a careful commentary on the reality of fame feeling like a blurring, debilitating high. Mac talks about seeking heaven, but never getting ‘high’ enough to reach it. Drugs, in the context of his project, seem to be given a power that fuels Mac’s chances at transcendence, while equally being the force of his shadowing demise (and eventual death).
“Friendly Hallucinations” drives the drug-high sensation home with its funky jazz movement and punchy lyricism. Mac doesn’t just talk about drugs but daringly invites them in. Mac has ‘conversations with friendly hallucinations’, an ode to the drug-induced illusions he knows on a first-name basis. This track is buoyant, and fancies ‘the high’ more than any other song on the album. If Balloonerism is a drug trip, “Friendly Hallucinations” is the pinnacle of the high.
Shifting to the Comedown
“Mrs. Deborah Downer” marks (both literally and figuratively), the comedown of the project. There’s a peculiar shift in perspective within this track where Mac moves towards the grim, and swallowing perplexities of drugs. There’s less recreational jabber about them, and a focus on the spiritual disruptions Mac experiences. It’s the first taste of ‘meta’ Mac we glimpse in the project.
Over a solemn jazzy soundscape, Mac raps, ‘Even pills turn to powder babe, the world wanna crush ’em down’. This track feels distant thanks to Mac’s swelling and echoey vocals. It’s as if the listeners are transplanted to a deep dark well where Mac explains how he got to the bottom. It’s a beautiful, melancholic transition closed out with the words of Ashley All Day: ‘Can I get four Norcos, two Oxys, two Roxys, three methadone, couple Percocets’, which feeds us back into the album’s theme of cyclical drug abuse.
Confronting Death
“Shangri-La”, a fictional Tibetan utopia in James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon, takes the title of track eight on Balloonerism. Tracing back to Cole Cuchna’s podcast, he contextualizes the Shangri-La reference as Rick Rubin’s studio/sanctuary where Mac sought refuge, and recorded Balloonerism. Rubin, Mac’s musical doula, and co-founder of the label Def Jam, actually named his sanctuary in LA, Shangri-La. This stands as both a place of spiritual healing for Mac’s relationship with drugs and the birthplace of Balloonerism.
Miller raps, ‘If I die young, promise to smile at my funeral’, and, ‘The weather’s nice today, what a perfect day to die’. Our first glimpse at the acceptance of death in the project. This confrontation bleeds into “Funny Papers”, which dances through the experience of reading a newspaper’s obituary.
Mac touches on the fleeting quality of life, and how death can be wittled down to the corner of a newspaper. There’s an optimistic movement to the song with its lighthearted piano and bittersweet melody, alluding not only to a confrontation of death but a warm welcome to it. Mac invites listeners into the enlightenment of accepting all things finite.
A Search for the Inner Child
The nostalgic ringing of children’s voices on a playground wraps itself around the track “Excelsior”, where Miller raps of adulthood stripping adolescent imagination. While flirting with reminiscent childhood memories, Mac raps about the severing of innocence involved when the world imposes its boundaries on his creative freedom.
Before there were rules, before there were limits, your only enemies were brussel sprouts and spinach.
– Mac Miller
This track is daunting, and eye-opening as it rears its head towards the past in search of the child Mac once was. “Manakins” adopts the same rawness as “Excelsior”, with a touch of nihilist optimism. The track opens with a beautifully warped harp that sounds nearly underground. Mac raps ‘What can we do? ‘Cause I see the light at the end of the tunnel it feels like I’m dyin’, dyin’, dyin’, I’m dead’.
At this point in Balloonerism, we feel Mac embracing the nature of death and owning the vices that he’s used to feel alive. ‘Why is heroism so close to heroine’ feels like a surrendering statement. Mac admits that drugs elevated his being while simultaneously swallowing him whole. This means so much more when contextually placed in unison with the closing tracks of the project.
The Unnerving Close to Balloonerism
Balloonerism is an inherently painful listen as Miller takes us through addiction, agonizing nostalgia, and shattering epiphanies. “Rick’s Piano” is the youthfully optimistic appetizer to the incredibly heavy reprise that follows. We’re invited to listen to Mac playing Rick Rubin’s piano while telling a knock-knock joke to engineer, Josh Berg. (Miller’s laugh that starts his rap verse is worthy of a tear-shed). Among the seriousness of Balloonerism‘s content, Miller still makes room for his playful rhetoric. ‘All of y’all are still bitches’ and ‘ET’s not dead, he’s just a little bit faded’, give listeners the chance to crack a smile amongst the feeling of a heavy heart.
“Rick’s Piano” feels like the first moment that Miller reaches a sense of enlightenment. Mac summons a sanguine voice with ‘The best is yet to come’. There’s a certain childlike optimism that rests within the seams of this track. Mac deals out his curiosity with a handful of questions about death. Mac asks, ‘Is there a heaven?’, ‘What does death feel like?’, and ‘Why does death steal life?’. Every floating thought feels like that of a child. They are a retrieval of Mac’s younger self after the affliction he’s faced.
“Tomorrow Will Never Know”
Miller’s turmoil is handed a grandiose ‘death’ in the nearly 12-minute outro. “Tomorrow Will Never Know” is terrifyingly eerie and all-consuming. With an ever-echoing phone ring, distant childlike voices, and swelling bass, the song is nothing short of moving. “Tomorrow Will Never Know” is not the acknowledgment of death; it is the death. It’s the death of the Mac we experience throughout the project, and the death of the album itself.
The sonics on display are harrowing, ambient, and deeply immersive. Cole Cuchna discovers yet another beautiful call-back within this track that links back to “Friendly Hallucinations”. In the previous tune, Mac raps ‘There’s no one on the other end of that telephone … let’s fall asleep to the metronome’. As Cuchna discovered, the outro contains the ambient phone ring that goes unanswered. There’s also a haunting metronome that accompanies the track’s cadence.
Mac leaves us with his last words: ‘If you could make it go away, give you a chance to start all over’, with a resounding six minutes of instrumental to follow. The album is coming to a close, and listeners are left with never-ending hollow noises. It’s isolating, yet forebodingly peaceful. “Tomorrow Will Never Know” has sonically created a death, sedating its listeners with a hallucinatory and enveloping experience.
“Don’t you love silence? Everything quiet but the music.” – Mac Miller
Mac Miller’s Balloonerism is a blessing from above. It’s a beautiful piece of art that listeners are able to indulge in, even without him being here to see it. And for that, we are the lucky ones.