Berninger landed on this odd medium around four years ago, during a period of writer’s block brought on by a depression so deep it got “almost to the point of being nonverbal,” as he told The Athletic‘s Brendan Quinn. “At that time, I started getting depressed by notebooks,” he recalled. “Whenever I’d see a notebook or an empty white page, it started to become a feeling—like, ah, there’s this thing I have to do. All these cool notebooks, I used to love them, but then they became such a part of my job… All I thought about was my notebooks and all the work I needed to work on.” At some point, a then-rare bit of inspiration struck. The issue? Berninger was on a flight with no access to his contemptible notebooks. His phone battery was also dead, but what he did have was a baseball—the singer has toured with one in his bag since the early days of his career just to have something to toss around on his breaks. He wrote down his idea, and something clicked. “I just thought, man, this is fucking cool,” he said.
Baseballs now make up the first step of his process, before the lyrics get translated to a laptop. “When you’re writing in a notebook or even on your phone or your laptop, there’s a line spacing. There’s a linear stacking of lines and stuff like that,” he said. “It starts to form the way you write.” The baseballs allow the writing to become more “gooey,” like a “lego” or a “piece of a collage.” In a video included with the article, Berninger shows off some of his draft balls, which are indeed covered in writing going every which way. One of them contains the lines, “Pay the co-pay / And take a mystery Dum-Dum from the jar / I pop it in my ass / And walk out for God.” That one tragically didn’t make it into a final draft, but Berninger explains how the ideas he jots down on the balls are more like “piece[s] of a collage” or “legos” that eventually come together into something more complete.
“You can change your traumas, the things that are weighing you down, your level of anxiety… by changing your pattern,” Berninger said. That’s a good lesson for all of us, even if we have to find our own version of Berninger’s baseballs. You can read the full profile, which also includes some sweet insights about Berninger’s catches with his father and daughter in turn, at The Athletic.
