‘Balloonerism’ Is a Fitting Final Piece of the Mac Miller Puzzle

In the seven years since Mac Miller’s death, I’ve often turned to his 2014 appearance on the Mass Appeal video series Rhythm Roulette, in which guests are challenged to make a beat with three albums or less. In it, the rapper and producer giddily assembled an instrumental in his garage recording studio, known as The Sanctuary, through a combination of sampling and live instrumentation. After plucking some snippets and laying down a drum track and some synths, he fetched a bass and improvised a riff while cartoonishly nodding his head. In the middle of all this, his father, who had been cutting the grass outside, walked by, and Miller cut the music off before summoning him in. “Say something to the people one time, dad!” he shouted, as the camera zoomed in on his parent’s face, friendly but befuddled: “Hi, how you doin’? Are you guys taking care of my son?”

Revisiting the video, I’m always gripped by a swell of emotion. Miller’s death from an accidental overdose at 26 naturally looms large in my mind, but the video was also shot around the time of a creative blossoming. The heady boom-bap of his 2013 album Watching Movies With the Sound Off had been a bold pivot from the lackadaisical vibes of his 2011 debut Blue Slide Park. Every project from 2014’s Faces—arguably his masterwork—onward played up the happiness and sadness constantly at odds in his writing, while leaning toward lusher and more genre-agnostic territory. Watching Miller’s goofball tendencies clash with his developing musicality on Rhythm Roulette, taped after the release of Faces, felt like the closest thing to a connector between those early eras. But Balloonerism, his seventh studio album, offers an even clearer view of that transition.

Unlike many posthumous projects, Balloonerism isn’t full of drafts and scraps hastily pieced together as a cash grab. (For what it’s worth, between this release and 2019’s Circles, Miller’s estate has been thoughtful and thorough about the quality control they exert over his work.) It was recorded during jam sessions between 2013 and 2014—some songs ended up on Faces and others leaked over the years, but at the time the whole project was shelved in favor of GO:OD AM, his more polished, hip-hop-centric Warner Music debut.

There’s plenty of rapping across Balloonerism, but the wanderlust of those spontaneous sessions is thick in these 14 songs. Miller’s inner singer-songwriter was poking his head out. His voice, scruffy but passionate, is deceptively versatile as it worms through the jazzy arrangements of “Friendly Hallucinations” and “Mrs. Deborah Downer,” and controls the foreground with a spirited hook on the bluesy highlight “Stoned.” On “5 Dollar Pony Rides,” he sounds uninhibited, scatting his way across an emotionally distant relationship—“You’re wasting my time/And I’m wasting your time, but that’s OK”—over bass, keys, and tambourine that shimmer like curtain beads; the early DNA of subsequent ballads like “My Favorite Part” or “2009” is evident here, and the song works as both an artistic bridge and a melancholic jingle all its own. 

This era of Miller’s music is defined by a blend of boyish charm with an encroaching sense of mortality—chilling stuff coming from an artist in his early 20s. But his gift was his ability to break down the prospects of death and lost innocence in a matter-of-fact way, making them lighter than air. On “Excelsior,” Miller briefly examines the hierarchy within a group of kids on a playground at a time when their “only enemies are Brussels sprouts and spinach”: There’s the boy from a rich family who bullies the others, the lonely girl who waits to be picked up by her grandpa. A line like “Whatever happened to apple juice and cartwheels?” might be cloying coming from anyone else, but Miller’s earnestness sells it. He ends the song by acting out his childhood dream of becoming a wizard.

Miller loved a good joke and a brain-expanding headtrip, but there was a purity to the way he slid his pain next to his comforts like Tetris blocks. “Funny Papers” ponders the meaning of life over a drunk driver’s death and a child’s birth, while closer “Tomorrow Will Never Know” depicts a depressive episode as a psychedelic dreamworld where the moon is made of water, and healing is as simple as hitting the reset button. It’s easy to read the disembodied phone ringing off the hook in the background as an omen of things to come, but Miller dispels any sense of fatalism in the song’s last hook: “If you could make it go away/Give yourself a chance to start all over.” He understood the grips of mental illness and addiction, and the difficulty of working your way out of the funk, but his day-by-day approach makes the song a conversation instead of an edict.           

To compliment that openness, the beats on Balloonerism are airy and proggy compared to the rest of Miller’s discography. Many feel like early versions of ideas he fleshed out on 2016’s The Divine Feminine or 2018’s Swimming, the last two albums released in his lifetime. Some songs are better for it, like the strobing “Stoned,” which is anchored by a funky guitar lick that would’ve slotted neatly into Swimming’s “What’s the Use?” or “Jet Fuel.” Others, like mid-album cut “Shangri-La,” are a little too spacey both musically and lyrically—his story of a trip to producer Rick Rubin’s estate, signing his major label contract, and buying drugs with a credit card trails off in a space of plinking synths and drums. It’s the one moment that feels more like a demo than a complete song.

Balloonerism works well as a full-length statement, but it’s perhaps read better as the missing piece of a puzzle that’s smaller than it should be because of his death. In the final five years of his career, Miller’s dedication to perfecting his music shined through; his last post on Twitter was about how excited he was to play Swimming with a live band. There’s no telling where he would’ve gone or what he might have done next, but Balloonerism, loose yet full of life, is proof that he took his time tricking out his rocket to the stars.