Kelsea Ballerini is ready for liftoff
Ever since Kelsea Ballerini saw Shania Twain soar into a theater on a flying motorcycle wearing a catsuit and closer- to- God hair, the rising country star has known she wanted to be a boundary-breaking daredevil. But, like Kelly Clarkson, she also wanted to be a bare-it-all open book — hitting the big notes and still cracking self- effacing jokes onstage in jeans and a T-shirt.
On Ballerini’s latest tour, she’s got the glittery jumpsuit and the denim, the vulnerability — and the push she needed to lift off.
Ballerini’s set includes upbeat , pop- inf lected songs from her fourth album, “Subject to Change” (2022), and adroitly crafted hits from her early days, including “Peter Pan” and “Love Me Like You Mean It,” that put her on the map in Nashville as a sassy young talent. But new heartbreak anthems from “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” a spare, emotional EP she dropped in February, after she went through a high-profile divorce from Australian country singer Morgan Evans, supercharged the show. Fans full-throatedly sang along, having memorized lyrics that were only out in the world for a few weeks, exhaling the release along with her. Ballerini gladly shared the mic.
“It’s not about me singing the song,” she said in an interview after the tour’s recent opening date. “It’s about us singing the song.”
Over the past few months, Ballerini, 29, has entered new territory, including a potent performance on “Saturday Night Live,” her debut there. The EP has intensified interest in her personal life, as she was photographed with a new beau (actor Chase Stokes) and joined the popular podcast “Call Her Daddy” to describe, in full girl talk detail, the unraveling of her relationship with Evans, whom she married when she was 24 and he was 32. It wasn’t easy to publicly air all this, Ballerini said, but “I don’t want to lose the openness that I’ve always tried to have.”
Where once the country ideal — at least musically — was to “Stand by Your Man,” as Tammy Wynette famously put it, lately younger artists have been charting their wifely disappointments: Kacey Musgraves and Carly Pearce chronicled their respective relationships’ demises, too. Operating in the wake of songwriter- performers such as Musgraves and Maren Morris, who upended Nashville’s traditional male tilt and pop suspicions, Ballerini is not coy about her career goals.
“I want to play arenas,” she said — which she is, on an upcoming tour with Kenny Chesney. But, she continued, “I want to be the main draw. I want the pyrotechnics. I want to crossover, dare I say.”
It was a day off, between “SNL” and her tour, and Ballerini was cross-legged and barefoot on a chair in a Manhattan hotel room, her shearling- lined sandals tucked below. In forest colors and fuzzy corduroy sweatpants, she was cozy personified — a star that seemed soft to the touch. She’s a hugger, and an over-sharer. When I complimented the mane of blond hair beneath her pizza shop baseball hat, she explained that it was extensions.
“I lost so much hair last year — just stress,” she said. “It’s growing back, in, like, little sprouts. It’s a whole thing.”
Then she laughed. “I could’ve just said, ‘ Thank you.’”
Ballerini grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, the only child in a fairly religious household; she occasionally led the singing at worship service. Her rhythmic sensibility revealed itself early: Her mother has told her, she said, smiling, that even as a baby, she bounced along to music so intently that she would scoot her high chair clear across the room. At home, the stereo was tuned to Top 40 (thanks to her mother), and classic crooners (for her father).
“Anytime I smell Bolognese, I hear Tony Bennett,” Ballerini said, “because my dad would be cooking some beautiful Italian meal and blaring that all through the house.”
Her parents split when she was 12 — she used to bad mouth their divorce, she said, but now that she has gone through one herself, “I have a lot more grace for them” — and she found a refuge in songwriting. “It’s the truest love in my life,” she said.
It helped her get through another trauma, when she witnessed the death of a classmate in a school shooting in 2008. By then, she had started voice lessons and picked up the guitar. She performed her first original song onstage at a recital in high school; she and her mother moved to Nashville when she was 15. “I just had this, like, stupid little knowingness,” she said, that she would find her way in.
By 19, Ballerini was signed as a songwriter herself, to the independent label Black River Entertainment, where she remains. Within four years, she was a Grammy nominee.