It’s the day before Kelsea Ballerini’s first headlining concert at Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena, and although the country-pop superstar is surrounded by bustling production crews and a cacophony of sirens and revving engines from the traffic outside, she’s seemingly as serene as this balmy spring day.
Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Later that night, she tells her 4.3 million Instagram followers that she’s battling a stress rash in anticipation of the big show. Ballerini has played the prestigious 20,000-capacity home base of the Lakers and the Grammy Awards before, as an opening act for Keith Urban and Kelly Clarkson. But on this night, for the first time, the stage will be hers.
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“There are just some shows that hit different,” she says. “There’s so much work I want to do in this city — I’m able to do and feel things here that I can’t anywhere else, but I think being in this busy environment all the time would be hard on my heart.” She pauses for a beat and looks down before continuing. “I’m a soft person, and everything hurts my feelings.”
For several weeks last fall, Ballerini, 31, temporarily left her haven in Nashville to embrace that busy environment, settling in Los Angeles while filming her first full season on “The Voice,” alongside fellow coaches Adam Levine, John Legend and Michael Bublé. “I needed to move there if I wanted to apply myself completely,” she says, “especially knowing the workload of being a coach on the show.”
That period of intense focus was the first real reprieve in Ballerini’s decadelong career from active touring — a decade that saw her vault from young hopeful to multiplatinum artist across five full-length studio albums and two EPs, and included marriage, divorce and ultimately a new love that deeply informed her songs and just as deeply strengthened her connection with her fan base. Her latest album, 2024’s “Patterns,” debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 as her highest-charting album to date and became the first No. 1 country album of her career. But the period in L.A. also provided her with some time to assess how far she’s come.
“To me, the ultimate sign of ‘I made it; people are listening’ was getting on country radio,” she says. “And I was happy with having achieved that goal — until I became brave enough to ask myself, ‘What else?’”
Kelsea Nicole Ballerini was born in Mascot, Tennessee, on Sept. 12, 1993, and launched her country music career 15 years later when she convinced her mother to move to Nashville. The seeds of that ambition were nurtured from her childhood — her father worked as a sales manager at a Knoxville-area country radio station and would take Ballerini to work with him on occasion. (Her parents divorced when she was 12.) Just as influential was her intense study of the careers of her idols, who include Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, Shania Twain, the Chicks and Taylor Swift.
“The school of becoming an artist was the school of being a fan,” she says. So she would start her days by watching hours of videos on the Country Music Television and the Great American Country networks, taking note of the songs’ writers and record labels as well as the video directors.
“I had this fight in me,” she says. “I had just left my hometown, my dad, my school and my friends, and my mom had uprooted her life for me to have this opportunity. I felt like I had a clear shot, and all I had to do was make it.”
Ballerini attended Nashville’s Lipscomb University for two years but preferred to spend most of her time writing songs. She performed for people waiting in line outside the Bluebird Café, Nashville’s legendary proving ground, until she eventually made her way inside and onstage.
“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as ambitious as Kelsea,” says Ballerini’s manager, Jason Owen, whose Sandbox Entertainment also reps Kacey Musgraves, Billie Eilish and Little Big Town. “She stands out because of her level of honesty, but I think she had to work to get there.”
There were some tough lessons along the way. Ballerini remembers presenting her music to an executive at a now-defunct indie label early in her career. “He looked at me and said, ‘Well, there’s already a Taylor Swift,’” she recalls. “And he was right. There weren’t a lot of young female singer-songwriter girls in country music to look up to — Taylor was the North Star for me, and still is in a lot of ways. I had to grow into my own identity as an artist and a songwriter and learn to differentiate myself.”
So Ballerini got to work with an even greater determination. “Everything that I loved seeing other artists do is what I wanted to do, and I’ve always had the audacity to do it,” she says. “I don’t think I’m the most talented person in the world — I know very well that I’m not — but I trust myself enough to know that I will always find a way to make it work.”
Ballerini’s initial albums put her on the map as a major country star, but there’s little question that her 2023 EP “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat” — which details her tumultuous marriage to and divorce from Australian singer-songwriter Morgan Evans — combined with her role on “The Voice,” put her on a higher level of stardom. The EP, which was nominated for a Grammy for best country album, made her real-life experiences public property, as millions of women saw themselves in her story of resilience.
Her following grew exponentially, but she found reliving those experiences onstage every night, in front of fans projecting their own difficulties onto hers, to be harrowing. “That EP was about the darkest time in my life,” she says, “and singing any of those songs live was never the plan, if I’m being honest. I very quickly had to detach from what I wrote to get through it.”
Not that it’s been easy. At one recent show, a fan sitting in the front row presented her divorce papers for Ballerini to autograph (the singer politely declined), and another interrupted a performance of her song “Penthouse” to scream “Fuck him!” about the song’s subject. Ballerini, however, wasn’t having it. “Guys, we have to stop saying that,” she said. “Seriously — we’re three years past it. Everything’s fine now. I sing the song for you now; it’s not about me anymore.”
Still, when it came time for her to release “Patterns,” the follow-up to “Welcome Mat,” this year, Ballerini admits she was terrified. “So many more people had ears on my music, which has always been the goal. But it was just as beautiful as it was really difficult.”
She credits her collaborators, Alysa Vanderheym, who co-produced and co-wrote every song on “Patterns,” and co-writers Jessie Jo Dillon, Hillary Lindsey and Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild for helping her to forge ahead through self-doubt.
“Kelsea has struck a chord with a lot of folks,” Fairchild says. “She was bold on the last three records and took chances to say things that some may have thought were too vulnerable, but that’s what people want. Being in a room with her and the girls for ‘Patterns’ and working it out — I’m so honored to have been a part of that process. Kelsea is in the zone right now and there’s no stopping her.”
Despite that endorsement, “I was fearful it wouldn’t resonate,” Ballerini says. “But musically, it’s the most interesting record I’ve made, and I love that I was creating with women that let me lead my own story.”
That story includes her new relationship with “Outer Banks” actor Chase Stokes. She wrote the song “To the Men That Love Women After Heartbreak” about him. “He loved it,” Ballerini says of Stokes’ reaction to the song. “When we first started talking, I hadn’t put out ‘Welcome Mat’ yet, and he stood beside me through that whole musical chapter. But when it was time to write ‘Patterns,’ I wanted to write about the things we were learning in our relationship. And I think with a lot of patience and therapy, we mutually have grown a lot in these last two-plus years.”
That mutual growth works both ways, as Ballerini has been adding acting to her skill set. She’s hoping to follow her guest cameo on Ryan Murphy’s “Doctor Odyssey” with a spot in “Run, Rose, Run,” the feature-film adaptation of a novel co-written by Dolly Parton and James Patterson that follows a young songwriter in Nashville. Ballerini was featured in the 2022 audiobook version.
“Dolly, out of the blue, asked me to do the audiobook with her, and I had never done that before,” she says. “That experience is what made me want to try acting. I think the idea of it gives me the ick, only because I don’t like watching it back. I’ve auditioned for a lot of things and not gotten them.” She sighs. “But I’m learning to find those feelings and harness them into different methods of storytelling, and so far, it’s been so good for me.”
For an artist as focused and determined as Ballerini, it’s surprising when she admits that “I’m not sure yet what the rest of my year will look like.” But whatever it is, she concludes, “I’ll never stop sprinting. But I’m now running toward things that I’m inspired by, not just the things that I feel like I need to do.”
Charity Spotlight
Kelsea Ballerini is renowned for her raw and honest songwriting. Vulnerability has become her superpower, but it wasn’t always that way. “Growing up, mental health and therapy weren’t openly identified,” she says. “Because of that, I’ve been working to reconnect with the parts of myself that aren’t so confident. That’s really at the core of a lot of what I’m doing now.”
So in 2021, the singer-songwriter founded the Feel Your Way Through Charitable Fund to raise money for nonprofits centered on mental health. The fund — which over the years has donated to Porter’s Call, the Loveland Foundation and the Trevor Project — shares a name with Ballerini’s book of poems from 2021, which touches on overcoming anxiety and trauma.
“Being such a perfectionist, I naturally have this fear of loss of control,” she says. “Even though control has not served me in my real life — in fact, I don’t actually want it — the need for it has always been a coping mechanism. It’s a fear tactic, because I’m scared and anxious that something’s gonna go wrong. That’s just one of the many patterns I’ve had to learn to undo in therapy.”
Ballerini’s foundation aims to lessen the stigma surrounding mental health, and also to help people find the resources they need to get relief.
“For a long time, I had gotten so used to making myself smaller,” she says. “I just want to keep spreading general awareness that there are tools out there to help us get through the tough times, and hopefully inspire others to feel worthy of their accomplishments — no matter how big or small.”
Location: W Hollywood; Styling: Rob Zangardi/Forward Artists; Makeup: Kate Synnott/The Wall Group; Hair: Brittany Leslie/The Wall Group; Dress: David Koma; Jewelry: Anita Ko; Shoes: Casadei
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