Kelsea Ballerini Is Returning to Her Center of Gravity

Kelsea Ballerini joins me from a sun-drenched room in Nashville. The first thing I notice is the greenery—plants, at least two, including a heartleaf winding its way down from the ceiling. Her environs end up offering quite the metaphorical fit for our conversation. These days, the singer-songwriter is all about nurturing her relationships—with her family, her friends, her mentees on The Voice, her partner, and, perhaps most importantly, herself. 

When I ask what her perfect day looks like, she takes a beat before answering: “A good little sleep-in with a dog snuggle in the morning, and a good Lagree session—it’s my obsession. Lunch with a friend with two glasses of wine, coming home and watching a movie. Then making dinner with my boyfriend and chilling. The older I get, the more I am truly such a homebody.”

Of course, nurturing oneself isn’t just about hearty meals and taking in the latest on VOD; you’ve got to have balance. Case in point: Kelsea Ballerini - Live On Tour, which kicked off on January 21 and is modeled after her showstopping Madison Square Garden concert. “They’re like, ‘Do you want confetti on this song and pyro on that song?’ I’m like ‘Absolutely,’” she exclaims. “More is more. I’m over budget, and I don’t care.” After all, these moments don’t come around often (not even for platinum-selling artists). “It’s the most tricks I’ve ever gotten to have in a show, you know?”

After a decade of navigating the whirlwind of stardom, Kelsea Ballerini’s feet are on the ground—even as she continues to reach for more. 

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A Tennessee native, Ballerini grew up with “really supportive” parents who encouraged her through dance (which she did for 10 years), track and field (“very short-lived”), and, eventually, music. While she had always been musically inclined—worship leading in the church choir, singing in the school Glee club—as she approached her teens, it became clear it was more than a fun extracurricular. “It really flipped for me when I was 12. That’s when my parents saw music go from a hobby to a passion,” she tells me. It was around this age she wrote her first song, spurred, in part, by her parents’ divorce. “I was getting tall, boys were getting cute, everything was changing—then my life started really, really changing,” she says. “I didn’t know what was going to happen to me.” Songwriting became something of a port in the storm. “I started writing songs, and it changed my life. It became the safest place. It still is.”

At age 15, Ballerini moved to Nashville with her mother, Carla. A few years later she landed a record deal and, at 21, released a self-titled EP. It contained five tracks that would eventually appear on her debut album The First Time, including the 2014 hit single “Love Me Like You Mean It.” A country star was undeniably born: “Love Me Like You Mean It” reached the very top of Billboard’s Country Airplay chart and hit number five on Hot Country Songs. Ballerini became the eleventh woman in history to score a solo number-one single on Country Airplay, and the first to do so with her debut single since 2006. Her follow-ups, ”Dibs” and “Peter Pan,” also hit number one, breaking a record last held by Wynonna Judd—from before Ballerini was even born. 

She was thrilled by what the success meant for her co-writers and record label (“I was so happy to have a team win because I knew how hard everyone had worked for it”). That is until the hits stopped hitting quite as hard. “Honestly, I didn’t understand the gravity of it until my streak ended. I had three number ones in a row, and then my fourth single was number three.”

In the moment, the dip felt like a nose dive: “I was like, ‘All right, that was a good run,’” she laughs. “I thought I had failed everyone.” But it turned out to be a valuable lesson. “In hindsight, I’m so grateful for that song. That gave me grace.” Ballerini learned that a song doesn’t have to go to number one to matter. “Having that lesson early on has proven very helpful for me.”

Ballerini takes to her lessons well—call her an honor student of life. For example: Her second EP, Rolling Up the Welcome Mat. After a string of successful albums, Ballerini found herself at a bit of a crossroads. “Really early on, my first manager sat me down and said ‘There’s celebrity, and there’s credibility. And you have to pick which one you want to lean into. Either one takes work.’ And I’ve always, always, always, at the end of the day, wanted to be a songwriter,” she explains. “But as my career unfolded, it was like, ‘Hey, Kelsea, host this.’ ‘Hey, Kelsea, do this pop collab.’ So, by opportunity, I ended up being way more front-facing.” 

Around the same time, she was experiencing a seismic shift in her personal life. In August 2022, after over four years of marriage, Ballerini filed for divorce from Australian country singer Morgan Evans. On Valentine’s Day 2023 (around three months after the divorce was finalized), she released Welcome Mat. In its round-up of the 100 Best Albums of 2023, Rolling Stone described the six tracks as “Ballerini’s most personal album yet,” praising the “succinct post-divorce diary” specifically for the songwriting. “I think Welcome Mat brought me back to my center of gravity,” she says. “I’m a songwriter. There are no bells and whistles to this, no glitter. It’s just me as an artist.”

I ask if that vulnerability comes naturally, or if it feels more like a necessary hazard of the profession. “If someone asked me a question about how I’m feeling, I probably couldn’t answer it,” she says. “But I could write a song about it. It’s my way of sorting through how I’m feeling, to get to how I’m actually feeling. Some people go for a drive, some people call their best friend. I just have to write about it.”

After returning to “the purity of writing” with Rolling Up the Welcome Mat, Ballerini was hooked on the feeling of, well, feeling. While the EP helped renew her sense of purpose, she still felt “immense pressure” for the follow-up. Though she had plenty of ideas, she was unsure where, and how, to start shaping them.

Ballerini went Virgo mode and brought herself back down to earth, “slowly and gently” writing with friends. “I was like, ‘Let’s go somewhere cozy, and it’s three days of built-in girl time, and if we don’t get a song, it’s still going to be a great time.’ But the retreat turned into something incredibly fruitful. “In those three days, we wrote ‘Sorry Mom,’ ‘Baggage,’ and ‘Two Things,’” she recounts. “I’m such a gut girl—it didn’t just feel safe, it felt free.’”

Thus Patterns was born. The 15-track album is a meditation on loving, losing, and loving again—but not romantic with a capital R. “It is a love record. It’s full of love—self-love, love for my family, my friends, my partner, whatever,” she says. “But it’s the nuance of it, the growth of it, the tension within it… that is so necessary and interesting to me.”

Growth is a major theme of one of her most anticipated ventures, as Kelsea Ballerini the student becomes Kelsea Ballerini the coach: Specifically, a coach on season 27 of NBC’s The Voice, which premiered February 3. She previously lent her talents to Team Kelly as an advisor, and briefly filled in for the superstar coach during an illness. The latter experience helped her realize she wanted to coach. “I have a screenshot on my phone! I sent a text to my girlfriends, and I was like, ‘I really think I want this chair one day.’”

Thanks to “perfect, divine timing,” she landed it. And like any good coach, she’s received as much wisdom as she’s imparted. “It’s been such a beautiful experience. I think it’s really sharpened me as an artist because as you’re giving advice, you’re also reminding yourself of the same thing,” she says. “As I was filming The Voice, I was also finishing the album. Then I was putting the album out, and I was actually doing the things I was giving advice about, so it was a refresher for me.”

The show has given her ample opportunities to support up-and-coming women artists, whom she’s “always known” she was “drawn to and protective of.” “It ignited in me, being in that seat, how much I want to see and enable and help facilitate whatever they need,” she tells me. She knows firsthand how meaningful it is to be welcomed into the community of women artists: When I ask her about some of her own industry mentors, she answers effusively. “A huge part of my growth is [thanks to] the women who came before me, turned around, reached out their hand, brought me up on their stage, had me over to their couch for wine, whatever it was.”

Among them: Lady A’s Hillary Scott, “certainly” Taylor Swift, Karen Fairchild from Little Big Town, Shania Twain (“I call her Queen Eileen”), Alison Krauss, and Trisha Yearwood. “I can name so many women who have held space for me, whether on their stage or privately,” she marvels. “To answer questions, to encourage me, to give me feedback on a song, whatever. That was huge for my confidence building in the beginning, and for just getting my footing. I credit so much of what I've learned to those moments.”

The Voice provided another lesson in self-love—a chance to look back on what she’s accomplished and give herself a well-deserved pat on the back. “It’s making me go into the last 10 years and think, wow, I really have done a lot. I have learned a lot,” she reflects. “It’s helping me give credibility to my career. Being up there with people I grew up listening to, and having an opinion they’re holding on the same level as their own, has felt beautiful.”

In her co-hosts—superstars John Legend, Michael Bublé, and Adam Levine—she’s found “three new brothers,” she tells me. “There’s a level of warm and fuzzy we all have for each other. There’s never been a day, not once, that we’ve left set without texting the group chat to build each other up.”

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A few days before The Voice premiered, Ballerini embarked on the “bucket list” arena tour she’d dreamed about for years. “I grew up going to the Thompson Bowling Arena in Knoxville, and my first concert was Britney Spears in a big room like that. I remember having this moment—it sounds so silly, I don’t know how old I was, but I was a kid—thinking, this person who’s music I love so much, who I’ve seen in magazines, they are nowhere else in the world except for in this room with me. That, to me, was the craziest, most magical thought in the world.” 

Fans can anticipate a healthy balance of razzle-dazzle and more intimate moments. “I think there’s a nice little dance of having these big, polished moments with pyro and a hydraulic lift—the drama, costume changes, give it, give it all to me!—and the moments in between, where it’s me and the guitar,” she says. 

Ballerini has no qualms about embracing the glitz associated with chart-topping music. At the top of the call, after I ask how the cover shoot went (“Amazing”), we start talking about her life-long love of beauty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the CoverGirl ambassador has always had a soft spot for cosmetics in particular: “I've always been a makeup girl. Growing up, my mom—she was a helicopter mom, for sure, and we love her and we’re grateful for it–but she did the thing where I [could only] introduce one piece of makeup every year,” she recounts lovingly. “So every other girl in middle school and high school was in a full beat, and I was getting, like, tinted Chapstick at first. Then it was clear mascara. Like Carla, be for real!,” she laughs. 

Still, “It was something I would look forward to every year, to be able to play with something new. But even as a kiddo, I was always getting into her makeup bag and playing dress up and all that stuff… it’s self-expression, another form of it. If I wasn’t doing music, I would be doing hair and makeup. It’s so meditative, like a beautiful art to me.”

Since 2023, Ballerini has been dating Outer Banks star Chase Stokes—a relationship that has become comfortably, delightfully normal, she tells me, despite the high profile. I ask her about his recent comments on the “delicate dance” between the public and the private that a celebrity romance requires. How do they make sure they’re always saving a little something just for themselves? “I think it’s always an ebb and a flow,” she says thoughtfully. “From the jump, we’ve always been really proud of our relationship.” But now, two years in, “we’re really building our life together. The more into that season we get, the more protective we are.” 

While they’ll “always be side stage, side carpet” for one another, life is starting to look delightfully normal. “When we have time off, like we do right now, we’re focused on quietly doing the work,” she says, like walking dogs, spending time with their families, and making dinner (a frequent shared activity). Later in our conversation, she tells me they’ve been really into steak: “That’s the go-to now and my favorite thing ever,” she says, gesticulating. “I’ll go to the butcher, I’ll get a good cut of steak, I’ll come home and marinate it in the fridge—I won’t even tell him. Then it’s dinner time, and I just pull out this marinated steak, and I’m like, ‘Yes I AM that bitch.’

The cozy nights spent carving up a prime cut are as meaningful as the ones spent on red carpets. “Things that seem mundane suddenly become like, ‘Okay, you’re such an important part of my mundanity now,” she says. “And it doesn’t take away from the moments that are big, like getting to show up to a premiere for him or him being at Madison Square Garden.”

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While the premiers and MSG of it all sound (and are) glamorously pop star, Ballerini is, above all else, a storyteller, the hallmark of any good country musician. Toward the end of our time, when I ask for her perspective on country’s growing mainstream popularity, she gently pushes back. “I’ve always considered myself country-adjacent. I grew up in East Tennessee, on a farm, and I write from a storytelling perspective. And I’ve dug my heels into the Nashville country music community–that’s home base for me. But I also don’t want to ever be boxed in, and I would urge every artist to feel that way.” 

With that in mind, she welcomes genre fluidity. “I think, sometimes, in the country space, you do one collaboration outside and people think you’re jumping ship, and that’s just not the case,” she says. Over the last few years, she’s loved seeing “so many artists from other genres come into country and vice versa.” As she sees it, “Music is music. It should exist for everyone, and the whole point of country music, in particular, is writing the truth, writing your story. It shouldn’t matter if there’s a banjo or a beat drop. It’s been really beautiful to watch new ears come into this community, and I love being a small part of that.”

Ballerini thinks just as expansively about her own path. When I ask her about what the future looks like, she tells me she’s generally living in the moment—making a “really great” deluxe Patterns, the tour, wrapping up The Voice. And beyond that, it could really be anything: acting, writing for other artists, or even penning something completely unrelated to music. “I’m just really open to whatever creative outlet might present itself.”

Living in the moment is the yin to the yang of ambition: “What I do know is I can’t sit still for more than two weeks, so I will be doing something,” she says with a smile. Again, balance.