South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Ballerini’s realizations in real time written into new album
Change is often difficult and painstakingly uncomfortable, but also a necessary, inescapable aspect of life. For country star Kelsea Ballerini, tussling with those growing pains are at the heart of her new album, “Subject to Change.”
“There’s a lot of realization that was happening in real time as I wrote it. And so, I think when you’re having big life realizations and pending changes and stuff like that, I just think that it takes a lot of selfreflection and ownership of your choices and what gets you there,” said the singer, 29. “I’ve always been really scared of change — it’s always been something that really terrified me. And I think I have just been really wrestling with the idea of, well, it’s inevitable.”
Cut entirely with a live band, the 15-track album— her first since 2020’s pandemic-marred “Kelsea” — was recently released and refined from a trove of more than 80 songs. Mostly penned by Ballerini — who is credited on every song, along with Shane McAnally, Julian Bunetta and Alysa Vanderheym — her fourth studio album traverses through love, heartbreak, infatuation, confusion and accountability.
Despite recently announcing her five-year marriage to fellow country singer Morgan Evans was ending, “Subject to Change” is far from a heartbreak album.
“It’s the most upbeat record I’ve ever put out. But there’s so much more meat on the bones,” explained the pop-country songstress. “I don’t think that growing up has to be sad. I don’t think that the
process, even though it’s messy, has to be shadowed by this heaviness. And I used to think it had to.”
While Ballerini hasn’t expounded on the details of the marriage’s demise, she doesn’t shy away from finger-pointing on the record — at herself.
On “Walk in the Park,” she sings, “I’m always looking for greener grass, on a carousel that goes too fast/ Up and down like a swing-set heart, I’m no walk in the park.”
“‘Walk in the Park’ is one of my favorite songs because I feel like it is the moment on the record that says I am good with me. I know I’m not a walk in the park. I know I’m not always the easiest person to be friends with or be in a relationship with,” Ballerini said.
“I own that, and I acknowledge that, and I’m on my own journey, and I’m working on it actively.”
That’s where the richness of the album is cradled, in Ballerini’s vulnerability and transparency, tools she credits her 2021 poetry book “Feel Your Way Through” with helping her display confidently.
Pop-heavy songs find Ballerini widening her sonic sandbox even more than previous releases, like “Heartfirst,” the
album’s lead single, “The Little Things” and the singalong, foot-tapping “Muscle Memory,” where she reconnects with a past love.
But with ’90s country female singers serving as inspiration, she is still anchored in her roots with tunes like “I Can’t Help Myself,” the fiddle-driven, Thelma and Louisereminiscent “If You Go Down (I’m Going Down Too),” and “You’re Drunk, Go Home” — the project’s lone collaboration — in which she, Kelly Clarkson and Carly Pearce tell bar patrons their sloppy advances aren’t welcome. The album closes with the beautiful, contentmentembracing “What I Have.”
The soon-to-be single singer’s growing pains are also forcing her to be open to new experiences; in September, she was a front-row fixture during New York Fashion Week.
Joking that she’d be hesitant to walk in a show because she’d “be the model that trips,” she’d consider if asked. That’s how she’s living her life these days: open to whatever may come.
“Nothing’s off the table anymore,” said Ballerini. “I feel like for so long, I was like, ‘I am this one thing.’ And now I’m like, ‘What else?’ ”