Basil Glen Ballard Jr.[1] (born May 1, 1953) is an American songwriter, lyricist, and record producer. He is best known for co-writing and producing Alanis Morissette's 1995 album Jagged Little Pill,[2][3] which won Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album and Album of the Year, and was ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Ballard was involved in the recording and writing of Michael Jackson's albums Thriller, Bad, and Dangerous.[4] As a writer, he co-wrote songs including "Man in the Mirror" (1987) [4] and "Hand in My Pocket" (1995). He is the founder of Java Records. He won the 2006 Grammy Award for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media for "Believe" (The Polar Express).
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Ballard founded the production company Augury in 2011, focused on developing music-driven projects in film, television, and theater.[5] In collaboration with Alan Silvestri, he wrote the score for musical adaptation of Back to the Future, with film screenwriter Bob Gale returning to write the book. Ballard scored the music for the 2020 Netflix series The Eddy, centering around a jazz club in Paris.[6]
Ballard co-wrote the music and lyrics for Ghost the Musical with David A. Stewart and Bruce Joel Rubin, which opened in London's West End on July 19, 2011, and opened on Broadway in the spring of 2012.
On January 31, 2014, it was announced that a stage musical of the film Back to the Future was in production.[9] The show, which is being co-written by original writers Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, premiered in Manchester, on February 20, 2020.[10] Ballard teamed with Alan Silvestri to compose a new score, with the addition of original songs from the film, including "The Power of Love", "Johnny B. Goode" and "Earth Angel".[11]
In 2019, a stage musical based on the music from Jagged Little Pill (and with the same name) opened on broadway following a successful limited engagement in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Ballard having provided much of the lyrics. The show ran for a month of previews and 3 months of performances before closing due to COVID-19; it reopened in October 2021 before officially closing only two months later in December. At the rescheduled Tony Awards for 2020, the show garnered 15 nominations in total, though only won two awards, in addition to winning the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. A subsequent Australian production, as well as a US tour followed shortly after, as well as the announcement of a London transfer.