Kelsea Ballerini Is Ready for Lift Off

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-inflected songs from her fourth album, “Subject to Change” from 2022, and adroitly crafted hits from her early days, like “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 the 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 (the 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 like 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 cross over, dare I say.”

It was a day off, between “S.N.L.” 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, Tenn., 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).

“Any time 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’s 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.

She filled her days studying tour documentaries and credits on CMT music videos, searching for names online to learn “who worked where, and what was a Sony, and who was a Hillary Lindsey,” the chart-topping songwriter. By 19, she was signed as a songwriter herself, to the independent label Black River Entertainment, where she remains. Within four years, she was a Grammy nominee.

But being an artist with pop ambitions on an indie label has had its challenges, she admitted, and there was a learning curve to being a female artist in a field that’s often hostile to them. She was 21, with her first Top 5 single, just after “Tomato-gate” happened — the brouhaha over a radio consultant calling women merely the garnish on the scene — and she suddenly realized how many yearslong gaps there were between female stars. “I was naïve and unaware,” she said, “part of a conversation that I wasn’t even ready for.” For her last two albums, she has chosen more female collaborators. “It really freed up this new creative space for me,” she said.

She makes a point to have at least one solo-written song on each project — for herself, and for the industry. “I have this insecurity that because I’m blond and I’m glittery and I like production, that people don’t take me seriously as a songwriter,” she said. With the solo song, “The underlying tone is, ‘Hey, I did this by myself. I didn’t have a man in the room.’”

Ballerini drafted “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat” mostly solo late last year, and finished and recorded it quickly, with just one collaborator. It came after Evans unexpectedly put out a single before their divorce was finalized last fall, claiming to be surprised at the breakup (his video is heavy on adoring female fans). Was her album a response to his track?

“Yes and no,” she said. “I don’t know if I would have written a song like ‘Blindsided’” — which checks off their troubles and uses the chorus, “Were you blindsided / or were you just blind?” as a retort — “had I not been responding to something that was already out there.”

Writing was a salve for her, she said, but she wasn’t expecting the music, with glimmers of the hip-hop syncopation that have been her hallmark, to connect so deeply.

Alysa Vanderheym, a songwriter and producer whose credits include Little Big Town and Blake Shelton, worked with Ballerini on the surprise release. “She knew exactly what she wanted to say — she had her titles, her concepts,” she said in a phone interview. “It’s so unfiltered — she just went there, she didn’t even second guess it — which is so inspiring to me.”

Ballerini was grateful, she said, that her label has never tamped down her ideas. In December, she called Patrick Tracy, the creative director she worked with on “Subject to Change,” and told him that, surprise, she was about to release a new EP, and that she wanted him to direct a short film to accompany it.

Their timeline was brief, but Ballerini’s vision was so clear, down to a shot where a stack of dirty dishes collapses, that she was credited as a co-director. “The story line from the very beginning was hers and hers alone,” Tracy said.

“The way she rallies her team around her ambition,” he added, “to me it’s sort of unmatched — it always feels collaborative.”

For the EP, Ballerini said, she abandoned “the commercial country artist” part of her brain, the awareness of how things would fit into radio or playlists. The last track, “Leave Me Again,” is just her voice and acoustic guitar, plaintive and hopeful.

“I feel really seen, and understood, as an artist right now,” she said.

And she’s getting a taste of what she dreamed of. “I have a little baby hydraulic lift on this tour,” she said. “I think it brings me 10 feet in the air. And all of a sudden, my legs are, like, Bambi. I’m terrified. But I like it.”

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