Chris Ballew is sitting on Vashon Island, basking in the sunshine, ready to half-watch The Bachelor finale while answering emails and booking shows. It’s the kind of multitasking domestic calm you don’t quite associate with a guy who once screamed about peaches in heavy rotation on MTV. But that’s Ballew now—split between a past of alt-rock absurdity and a present defined by fuzzy creatures and preschool poetry.
The Presidents of the United States of America’s 2008 album These Are the Good Times People recently hit its 10th anniversary, and Ballew’s feelings about it have aged like a fine can of mixed fruit.
“I listened to it again after you contacted me,” he says, “and I loved it.”
It was the first and only Presidents record to feature guitarist Andrew McKeag instead of founding member Dave Dederer. “Dave was more tasteful picking, kind of MC5 fuzz. Andrew was like this warm ball of goo,” Ballew explains, possibly inventing a new genre descriptor in the process. That goo gave the album a ‘70s sideburns-and-motorcycles energy, and also gave Ballew the green light to dig into the vault.
“There’s a bunch of songs on there that were gathering dust for years. Some Dave wasn’t into recording, but Andrew and Jason were. So I finally got to bring them out and freshen them up.”
One of those songs, “Mixed Up S.O.B.,” was originally written while painting a house in 1989 and even submitted to Tom Petty as a potential cover. “He didn’t reply,” Ballew laughs, “but we did open for him at the Fillmore during a 21-night stand. That was special. We had a rule not to open for anyone… but when Tom Petty calls, you take the damn call.”
The video for that track was directed by Weird Al Yankovic, who somehow turned one day of filming into a literal flipbook. “Maybe too much science,” Ballew admits, “but it was an excuse to hang out with Al.” The two had been friends since Yankovic turned “Lump” into “Gump” in the ’90s, and the collaboration felt like a full-circle moment.
There’s a hidden sharpness to the album, too. While the title declared “Good Times,” there’s a track called “Bad Times” that repeatedly chants “I wish.” Released at the tail end of the Bush era, the song walked straight into the Obama administration—though Ballew offers a theory about what came next.
“I think Trump’s giant pulsating shittiness actually inspired a surge of reverse-positivity. Like gas hitting $10 a gallon so everything just breaks and has to change.”
This sort of cosmic optimism in the face of chaos feels baked into Ballew’s worldview—whether he’s describing the ethnosphere (“the story of ourselves”) or warm pork meat in Czechoslovakia. The album’s title, in fact, came from those surreal tour moments. “We’d be backstage eating weird food in weird places, and I’d just say, ‘These are the good times, people.’ Usually because I didn’t want to be there.”
These Are the Good Times People would end up being the Presidents’ last studio album before the band quietly faded into the background. “We had one foot in trying to swing for the fences and get on the radio in Australia, and the other foot in realizing we just needed to take care of our people.”
That self-awareness—mixed with the inability to fully chase commercial glory again—defined their twilight. “Once you taste success, you think you’ve mastered grabbing a nation’s attention. And then you feel like you have to prove it wasn’t an accident. But we couldn’t really do it again.”
Looking back, Ballew sees breadcrumbs from that album leading straight to his current gig as kindie rock savior Caspar Babypants. “Songs like ‘Ladybug’ and ‘Dune Buggy’—basically the Presidents were Caspar Babypants with an extra layer of innuendo and loud guitars.”
Even 1998’s Pure Frosting, technically a compilation, gets a nod. “It had a few new songs that were meant for a next record that never happened—‘Sunshine,’ ‘Teenage Girl’—plus ‘Cleveland Rocks.’ That was Drew Carey’s doing. We met on Rosie O’Donnell. He knocked on our trailer, hung out, and later gave us a job.”
Now Ballew’s focused entirely on making music for kids (and weird adults with open minds), releasing Caspar Babypants records at a pace that would make Robert Pollard blush. “Tell everybody to go to babypantsmusic.com for all their music needs. Even if you don’t have kids. Put that out there.”
We just did.
Listen to the interview above and check a some classic below!
