There I Ruined It Creator Dustin Ballard Is Taking His Musical Mayhem to Live Stages

It all started with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga's performance of "Shallow" at the Academy Awards, a copy of Pro-Tools and a lot of unplanned free time.

"I removed all the audio and replaced it with my own audio and singing," says musician Dustin Ballard. "I changed the whole chord structure, and it turned into a polka song. It created this interesting effect where you're listening to a version of it through an alternate universe."

Ballard's mangling of the Oscar-winning duet launched There I Ruined It, an insanely popular online music channel that reorganizes new and classic hits into new beats. Ballard's work on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube has produced unlikely duets with the likes of The Genius himself, Ray Charles, and the genuinely irritating Nickelback, new genre visions that turn Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice" into a Disney musical number and even brand-new songs consisting entirely of "Yeahs" sung in songs by Van Halen, Taylor Swift and Metallica.

There I Ruined It has a combined count of 4.5 million followers and has attracted a noticeable number of famous fans such as Jack Black, Michael Bublé, Lin Manuel Miranda and several members of The Roots. When Scott Bradlee, founder of the jazz cover collective Postmodern Jukebox, reached out to Ballard to talk about his gift for mangling musical classics, he says it "put the fire under me to do a live show."

Ballard says he's assembled a band of Dallas musicians, including some from his days in the Western swing group Shoot Low Sheriff, to start rearranging tunes for a local show some time in late summer or early autumn. He's keeping his fans abreast of the show's details in the official email newsletter that people can subscribe to on his website.
Ballard started his mashup channel during the COVID outbreak, when his polka remake of "Shallow" got over 100,000 hits on YouTube in a single day. It's been steadily growing since then, and it's "never slowed down."

"[The idea for the 'Shallow' remake] literally came to me in a dream," Ballard says. "It was 4 in the morning and I just had this thought. I wondered if I could replace the audio almost like a music version of Bad Lip Reading, not that I'm changing the words but in the sense that you're watching something that you're not actually watching."

There I Ruined It's approach to music feels like its own mashup. Ballard's covers combine the arranging of strange sounds in music melodies made famous by Spike Jones (the comic musician, not the director) and His City Slickers, and the satiric spoof targeting of "Weird Al" Yankovic-style parodies. Incidentally, Yankovic is also a frequent follower and commenter on Ballard's site and has called his work "brilliant."

"There's a few ways I ruin songs," Ballard says. "There's a classic mashup, and the way I do it is pretty different, where I refit the notes to fit other chord structures. Then there's just like nonsense like using autotune so I can arrange notes in ascending order. Some of it's kind of juvenile, like my compilation of words like all 'Yeahs' or 'Heys' seem to be doing well. Then there's some where I'm playing my own instruments behind the vocals and changing up the genre."

The sudden rise of AI and its capabilities to re-create the voices of famous golden throats has opened whole new avenues for Ballard's channel to spoof songs and recreate popular tunes in new styles and genres. He says he has a source in South America who can rework his singing voice to create an eerily accurate re-creation of pretty much anyone with a Spotify catalogue.

"The prospect of using Kurt Cobain's voice takes it to another level of weirdness," Ballard says. "I met some people through friends of friends and that's how I met my guy in South America. He basically puts snippets of a capella tracks into his program and does it all." 
Some of Ballard's tracks have also caught the attention of some of the artists he's ruining, such as Snoop Dogg, who reacted to his mashup of "Gin and Juice" and Baloo the Bear's "Bare Necessities" from Disney's The Jungle Book, and Ed Sheeran, who called his mashup of "Forever" and the water level theme from the NES game Super Mario Bros. "weird" in a live react video. 

"The only exception I've found so far is The Village People, and I'm not sure if it's the band or The Village People's people," Ballard says. "I had to scrub my entire library of mashups including one with Linkin Park and 'Y.M.C.A.'"

Making There I Ruined It live has its own challenges. Ballard says he's in the middle of arranging and rehearsing all the tunes that his band plans on covering and mashing together on stage.

"The arrangements, which fall on my shoulders, are different from musical standpoints," Ballard says. "Even though they are covers done in such a different way, I have to figure out how this verse fits in the chorus of this song. Basically, I do a framework so I can send it to my band and they can know what's up. The show is still evolving."

Ballard says he hopes the shows will help him find ways to release his tracks as an album so they'll get airtime on streaming platforms without being flagged for copyright violations. He's also just ready to get back on stage and make music, even if it's with other musicians' hits.

"At heart, I'm a performer and it's a lot more fulfilling to play in front of an audience than sit in my music room making dumb stuff and sending them out into the world," he says. "That and we've got over 4 million followers."