Bio | Norm Ballinger

Albums and merch: normballinger.bandcamp.com

I’ve been playing guitar nearly 57 years now. In my teens and twenties I played the bars and coffee houses in Akron and Cleveland, Ohio, then later in Houston and Austin playing country blues on acoustic guitar. In 1984 I played main stage at Kerrville Folk Festival as a sideman to singer-songwriter George Ensle, but I guess I’ve been flying more or less under the radar most of my life.

In my youth there were so many things I wanted to explore. I’ve always supported myself, at least marginally, with carpentry and other handy work. This approach gave me the flexibility to get into poetry, dance, performance art, and trash magic. Two books of my writing have been published in Austin and Houston – The Mandelbrot Set, based on a performance collaboration with poet David Moorman in 1991, and Return, a collection of short stories and poems was published in 1994. Many of these poems were explorations in the mixing of spoken word and music accompaniment.

In 1995 I began construction of what turned out to be the first strawbale home permitted in Austin, where I still live with my partner. This coincided with my involvement with and continuing devotion to natural building through my association with The Sustainable Building Coalition, now known as Design-Build-Live. But I did get a bit too far away from music for a time and that really hurt, so in 2004 I produced my first collection of songs and poems, called Up Till Now. My second album, A Fine Thread Of Hope, with an amazing group of musicians in Detroit, Michigan came out in 2007. Released in 2012, Where The Heart Lingers, is a collection of original songs and instrumentals recorded at Roost Studio in Manchaca, TX with musician/producer/engineer Jimmy George.

In July of 2022 I had a meeting with Jimmy about some songs I wanted to demo. We scheduled a date and I recorded 5 song in that session. His enthusiasm for the songs was unexpected, so I started thinking about doing a full production on a few. That expanded to a full set of tunes, some of which had been laying around for a while, so here we have Possible World, released on 9/9/23.

— Norm Ballinger