Last year, four-time Grammy nominee Kelsea Ballerini returned to her Knoxville, Tennessee hometown to headline her first ever arena show at Thompson Boling Arena. On Oct. 29, she will expand to headline New York City’s Madison Square Garden, which will serve as a preview of sorts to her first headlining arena tour, which launches in January.
“I grew up going to shows in Thompson-Boling Arena and arenas have always been the goal, but that’s a huge jump to make — to go from clubs and theaters to the bigger clubs and then to make that jump [to arenas] is scary. I always knew if I was ever lucky enough to make that jump, I wanted to do it right,” Ballerini tells Billboard.
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She adds, “My business manager jokes with me, he says, ‘You’ve always had production that’s bigger than the room you’re in.’ And it’s true. I’ve always invested in making a show, not just standing there and presenting music, but really making a world for people to step into.”
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When she plays Madison Square Garden, Ballerini will build on that ethos, highlighting songs from her fifth full-length album Patterns, out today (Oct. 25) via Black River Entertainment. As with her previous albums, Ballerini has been steadfast about not just “making a world,” but bringing fans deeply into that ecosystem. Patterns finds her coming forth from the wreckage of divorce and finding new solid ground.
Unlike the heartbreak-chronicling thematic terrain of her 2023 EP Rolling Up The Welcome Mat, which was crafted during the dissolution of Ballerini’s previous marriage to singer-songwriter Morgan Evans, Ballerini’s 15-song new album finds her overlapping instinctive pop savvy with lyrics that celebrate her current moment, but also excavate the habits and emotional repetitions that have proven beneficial or to be a stumbling block.
Over the past year, Ballerini has found new love with Outer Banks actor Chase Stokes—but fans shouldn’t expect an album full of lush, romantic fare. She lauds friendship on “I Would, Would You,” owns up to her best and worst choices on “Baggage,” and espouses self-acceptance on “Nothing Really Matters.”
“I think people expected me to make a really happy record, but I would push back and say it’s probably a step farther than that. Instead of happiness, there’s more peace in the record,” she says. “It comes from just owning my s—t, and that pile of luggage with this beautiful sunset [on the cover of Patterns] is the personification of that, of sitting on top of everything that has made me, me. I think it’s about not apologizing for the messiness or the humanness that we have when we grow up and just letting it be part of you. You hear a lot of not only my patterns that I have obviously just as a singular person, but also the patterns that I experience with the people that are closest to me. Some of them are celebratory and happy, and some of them are being addressed, and there’s so much freedom in that.”
To craft the album, Ballerini went on a series of writing retreats in St. Louis, East Tennessee, and the Bahamas with a quartet of her close friends and collaborators, the album’s co-producer/co-writer Alysa Vanderheym and songwriters Hillary Lindsey, Jessie Jo Dillon and Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild.
Though Ballerini says she wasn’t intentional about working solely with women, she notes, “I didn’t know where to start, but I knew if I was going to start, I needed to feel super safe. I asked these four women to start the journey with me because they are my friends and I knew if anything came out of a retreat, it would be with them.”
Trusting her instincts proved prescient, as the first retreat together forged the songs “Sorry Mom,” “Baggage” and “Two Things.”
“On the bus ride back home, I was like, ‘Hey, I think I’m going to lock the door on inviting more collaborators into the process. I think I just want this record to be some version of the five of us.’ From then on out, it was just us,” she says.
Ballerini says that the bone-scraping honesty on “Sorry Mom” — a song that finds her naming ways she may not have lived up to familial expectations, including drinking, dropping out of college and at times putting career before family — made it the first composition Ballerini felt could truly follow Rolling Up the Welcome Mat.
“‘Sorry Mom’ had that same sharpness to it, but it wasn’t sharpness for the sake of shock and awe. It was sharpness for the sake of honesty,” she notes.
When Ballerini’s mother heard the song, “The first thing she said [was] ‘You have nothing to be sorry for,’ and it was a very beautiful moment,” Ballerini recalls. “Honestly, I think part of that song is addressing the generational pattern of maybe her mom swept things under the rug, and maybe if I didn’t bring up some things, we probably would never talk about them. But it’s about breaking that cycle and going from mother and daughter to moreso woman to woman.”
Ballerini had already written and recorded “Cowboys Cry Too” to “honor the men in my life who [had] openness and vulnerability,” when she met Noah Kahan during Grammy Week in Los Angeles.
“There was such a songwriter synergy in our conversation that I sent him a text and was like, ‘I feel like this is a song that really needs a male perspective and would you be willing?’” she says, adding, “I thought it was interesting to hear a woman’s perspective on toxic masculinity, but it really wasn’t until Noah wrote his verse and just went there in the lyrics that I think it really hit. He’s such an incredible songwriter. He wrote his verse on the road, and we met back up in Nashville and the studio, and he sang it to me. I was like, ‘This is exactly what this song needed.’ What a gift.”
“Cowboys Cry Too” has garnered Ballerini and Kahan a CMA Award nomination for musical event of the year, while Ballerini is up for female vocalist of the year ahead of the Nov. 20 ceremony. But even with lyrics that cut deep, there is a playfulness threaded throughout the album, even into songs such as “First Rodeo,” which centers on the first blush of new romance.
“I think I’m finally honoring the play of it all. This is supposed to be fun,” she says. “Making records is fun, and if you get too in your head or too in the weeds about where it’s supposed to fit and who’s supposed to like it, then you lose the heart of it. I think I’ve really leaned into the play element of this record.”
Simultaneously, Ballerini is expanding her visibility as a multi-faceted entertainer, thanks to roles as a coach on The Voice when season 27 launches in 2025, and a small part on the new series Dr. Odyssey.
“I read the [Dr. Odyssey] script and the character felt like something I could do, but also would definitely push me. It was a two-week shoot, and I was in [Los Angeles] doing The Voice anyway, so it worked out. It was like, one day I was playing a character named Lisa [on Dr. Odyssey] and the next day, I was coach Kelsea [on The Voice].”
Her most aspirational film role would be one that builds on her previous work voicing young musician AnnieLee Keyes in the audiobook for the Dolly Parton and James Patterson book Run, Rose, Run (“If that ever turned into a film, [that role] would be my dream,” Ballerini says).
“I think I’m just in the part of life where I’m running towards things that scare me,” she says. “I want to see what else creatively could fulfill me, knowing that music will always be home base and will always be my priority. But if I have the time in this space, kind of what I was saying earlier with arenas, why not now? I’m just having so much fun playing and trying new things.”