Balloonerism.
Some thoughts on the “lost” Mac Miller project recorded in 2014.
There are two types of kids when it comes to Christmas. The ones who wait until Christmas morning to see what Santa Claus left under the tree, and the ones who tear apart the house trying to see the presents early — I was the latter growing up.
When Mac Miller passed away in September 2018, unreleased music started to surface online a few months after. They were welcome surprises, but I felt conflicted about hearing music that was not officially released. It felt wrong, but I also enjoyed experiencing new music from different periods of his life and feeling like he wasn’t gone. New songs would occasionally appear, but eventually I found myself looking for them, instead of finding them.
Soon, I felt like a kid again — tearing apart the internet, trying to unearth more of Miller’s music. With every song, I learned more about the range of Miller’s musical talent, the depth of his creative energy, and the mythology of his discography. These leaked records were wonderful remnants of different eras of his music, but I was learning that some these records had eras unto to themselves. Miller often referred to his projects as planets, bouncing from one planet to the next, ready to explore a new frontier. However, I had never considered how many planets existed in Miller’s solar system. Before I knew it, it wasn’t just leftover GO:OD AM tracks I was discovering, but songs from entire projects that had never seen the light of day.
Hell, for some of these unreleased projects, Miller himself wasn’t seeing much daylight.
Many of these unreleased projects were created at “The Sanctuary,” Miller’s pool house recording studio at his Studio City mansion. Miller had just wrapped up an extensive period of touring, and his feet were finally underneath him with no other obligations beyond his artistry. There was a rotating cast of characters that would cycle in-and-out of the studio, to make gorgeous music or to do Jay-Z impression freestyles for hours at a time (shoutout Vince Staples & Earl Sweatshirt) —it was a never ending kickback & a jam session with some of the world’s most talented musicians. The sanguine-tinted room was Miller’s homebase for musical creation, experimentation, and collaboration. It was a period of immense creativity and workmanlike output, but also the time where Miller’s subject matter was openly darkest.
The magnum opus of “The Sanctuary” sessions came in May 2014 with the release of Faces — a phrenetic, existential, coke-soaked odyssey through Miller’s psyche. However, slightly before Faces, Miller had started work on a different, more experimental approach to his drug-addled existentialism. He recorded the project in about a week or so’s worth of time around March 2014, before ultimately being putting it on the back burner in favor of what would become Faces. The project made its way to light in 2020, almost like an archival scavenger hunt for diehard Miller fans that were chronically online. First, a few songs leaked that were created for this unnamed project. Then, what was believed to be the official artwork came out, along with an alleged tracklist pieced together from various screenshots and metadata, and a title — Balloonerism.
While Faces was this face-melting, psychedelic expressionist self-portrait over vibrant jazzy production; Balloonerism was a more ethereal, abstract opiate-impressionist exploration of his mortality. A jarring display of morbid curiosity and childlike innocence, set in this surreal dreamscape lush with tambourines, organs and other lovely instrumental flourishes.
Songs dealt with drug use either overtly with titles like “Stoned,” or more metaphorically like SZA personifying cocaine on “The Song That Changed Everything” (the title that “DJ’s Chord Organ” originally leaked under) and “Friendly Hallucinations.” Yet, there were also youthful motifs that would obscure the drug use. Like “5 Dollar Pony Rides” invoking imagery of fair rides but alluding to “riding the (white) pony” (doing cocaine), or “Mrs. Deborah Downer” playing on the childhood epithet “Debbie Downer” and dealing with opioid use and coming down from a high. There was clearly intention and deliberate themes to unpack, but no clear framework to fully digest them, and that made trying to fully understand Balloonerism difficult.
On top of that, Balloonerism was also rough when it leaked. Being rough in the sense that it wasn’t fully mixed & mastered, and lacking an authoritative track listing to define what songs Balloonerism should’ve consisted of — so it felt like I was listening to a compilation, not a complete body of work. Then, the specter of Miller’s passing loomed over all the music and made hearing lyrics like, “Am I okay? Fuck no /Just so nuts, so / Need to let the drugs go / Tryna find Heaven, I get high but never come close” on “Do You Have a Destination?” just really rough to listen to with hindsight.
For those reasons, I didn’t visit Balloonerism often. I appreciated it’s existence, but never really had the wherewithal to engage with it beyond that. So, when I saw the Miller Estate announce their plans to release the project, I was excited to hear what a complete version would sound like. As with Circles, the estate kept the brain trust of original collaborators involved in creating Balloonerism intact to complete the project, and they were able to reference Miller’s existing playlists to make a final track listing that best reflected Miller’s intentions (only 1–2 songs were adjusted from his last iteration of the playlist). Posthumous releases are inherently difficult, and Miller would’ve undoubtedly tinkered with the album (as he did with every other project), but there was clear care put into respecting his artistry and adhering to his vision as closely as possible (they even commissioned a short film as a companion piece for it!), and I’m thankful to his estate for finishing this body of work so thoughtfully.
On January 17th, 2025; five years after the release of Circles and two days before Miller’s 33rd birthday, Balloonerism was officially released.
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Although I had already heard the majority of the songs (all of them except for “Shangri-La” and “Rick’s Piano”), the official release has really changed how I viewed the project. Instead of being a compilation of songs with similar motifs, and choices I couldn’t identify as intentional or happenstance, Balloonerism now feels like an album with a thematic framework and a deliberate vision.
So, what is Balloonerism?
Titles were integral to Miller’s projects, and anchored the conceptualization of a given work’s central themes, but discerning Balloonerism’s title is tough because the word doesn’t exist. Balloons are these empty vessels that float aimlessly before eventually coming down, and Balloonerism appears to be a portmanteau of “balloonist,” someone who flies in balloons and the suffix “-ism,” that denotes the act or process of doing something. So, balloonerism could be loosely defined as “the act of flying in balloons.” And if you look at these balloon rides — going on trips, where we get higher and higher, floating aimlessly, before inevitably coming down — as a metaphor for drug use (and the highs from drug use as their own metaphorical life cycle) and the liminality of life & death, understanding Balloonerism becomes easier.
The album essentially chronicles the highs and lows of a drug trip. Starting with an initial high for the first third of the album (“Tambourine Dream” is a play on the strain of weed, Tangerine Dream), before the come down on “Mrs. Deborah Downer” which ends with a drug order for a re-up. Then, there’s a second high starting with “Stoned” that takes on a more philosophical tilt about peace (“Shangri-La”), life (“Funny Papers”) and the loss of innocence (“Excelsior”), before a brief horrorcore escalation with Miller’s alter ego, Delusional Thomas, on “Transformations.” The high crescendos on “Manakins,” with the chorus “‘Cause I see the light at the end of the tunnel / It feels like I’m dyin’, dyin’, dyin’ / I’m dead” and we enter a space between life and death on “Rick’s Piano,” before ending with his death (Miller often chose to end his albums with a “death”) on “Tomorrow Will Never Know.”
After sitting with Balloonerism with fresh ears for the past week, it’s remarkable that the bulk of this was created in a two-week jam session. There’s these moments of musical dexterity, like Miller playing Daniel Johnston’s (a lofi pioneer and children’s musician, adding to the recurring childhood motif) organ on the keyboard for “DJ’s Chord Organ,” or choosing to open the project with himself playing the tambourine; that are astonishing choices for their creativity, but also give the album such a unique feel.
Miller’s creative homages to his musical influences only add to the singular texture of the album. Some are fun & subtle, like the nod to Outkast’s Aquemini on “Friendly Hallucinations,” but also there’s a slew of Beatles’ references that contextualize and enhance the understanding of Balloonerism. The Beatles were one of his favorite bands (Miller even had a John Lennon tattoo) and he often cited Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as one of his favorite albums, and their influence is cast all throughout the album. Whether it’s the dreamy guitar and rising drums riffs on the Sgt. Peppers-esque anthem “Manakins,” or the accented cold-open and dancing between raindrops of joy & despair as he reads about the people’s lives on “Funny Papers,” echoing Lennon’s performance on the Sgt. Pepper’s closer, “A Day in the Life” — Miller loved the Beatles and it’s never been clearer than on Balloonerism.
Perhaps their influence is most palpable on the album’s outro “Tomorrow Will Never Know,” which is an allusion to the Revolver outro, “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Lennon wrote the track while tripping on LSD and listening to his own spoken-word recording of passages from The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Miller’s play on the song sees himself in conversation God at the end of his life. It’s a haunting track, with an eerie phone call going to voicemail, as he raps the lyrics “You walk through this world with your head above water / Shoes made of copper, just tryin’ to float.” His last words on the song being “Give you a chance to start over” before transitioning into these dreary synths, and faint sounds of kids playing, for a prolonged 7-minute instrumental-outro. This time, we hear the phone ring and gradually get louder, but it goes unanswered, implying that he’s finally gone to sleep (a recurring motif throughout the album that’s a euphemism for death). Totaling at just under 12-minutes long, it’s a grand culmination of ideas from throughout the album (the children’s playground sample from “Excelsior” and the metronome that he suggests he “fall asleep to” on “Friendly Hallucinations” are both present during the instrumental outro) and a fitting end to the “trip” of the album.
What’s equally remarkable about Balloonerism, is that Mac Miller was 22 years old when he made it. It’s truly stunning to hear such fearless, clear-eyed honesty from someone so young, candidly and artfully, questioning what to make of his existence. With a level of maturity and introspection that many people never reach, let alone at 22.
Like think about, “Rick’s Piano” for a second. Featuring a piano chop that Miller played at Rick Rubin’s studio, Shangri-La, it’s this stream of consciousness of increasing darker verses that are buttressed by the refrain “the best is yet to come.” Which has this incredible philosophical tension, where you can read it as welcoming death as an unburdening from earthly concern, or an indignantly optimistic decree that the future is what we make of it. That alone presents a lot to contend with, and comes before he pointedly asks God in the chorus, “What does death feel like?,” “Why does death steal life?” and “Why does death steal light?” Josh Berg, Miller’s engineer during this time and the man he does the “knock knock” joke with at the start of the song, described it as a man “yelling at God at his funeral,” and I can’t think of a better way to describe it. That fearlessness, to openly contemplate your mortality so thoughtfully and beautifully, is incredible and unbelievable to think it came from someone so young.
However, what’s most remarkable is that the 22 year-old that made Balloonerism — this beautiful, dark, existential album questioning what he was doing on this planet — was the same man who was eager to live his to the fullest the very next year.
Balloonerism is a snapshot of a specific time period, which bravely documents the emotions of that moment, but it doesn’t define who Mac Miller was. If anything, it’s a testament to his growth that transpired since then. It’s a reminder that now is only now; and affirms the importance of moving forward in spite of tough times, because we control tomorrow, and the best is yet to come.
