NEW YORK — Kelsea Ballerini is beaming. It’s not a nervous smile, although she admits she’s scared. She’s been hard at work on her fifth full-length album, ‘Patterns,’ and on October 25, the world will finally hear it – hear her in a collection of songs she describes as an “accurate snapshot” of her life. And lately people are curious. The story they hear, she assures, is not the story they expect.
“I think people are probably expecting this really happy, loving, mushy, bubbly record from me. That is not the case,” she told The Associated Press. “And I’m really proud of that. I think it would have been easy to just collect the really beautiful parts of my life that I’ve dusted off and found over the years. But that is not the completeness of my experience.”
In a sense, she refers to the super-successful ‘Rolling Up the Welcome Mat’ from 2023, an EP and short film that told the story of the dissolution of a marriage, a not too veiled reference to her own life, where In 2022 Ballerini noted that she was divorced from Australian country singer Morgan Evans. These days, she’s teamed up with “Outer Banks” star Chase Stokes, a relationship that audiences have fallen in love with. But her love life isn’t the only heart of ‘Patterns’.
“A lot is said about how you can go from fighting something or with someone to fighting for something or for someone. And there’s a lot of that journey in the whole record,” she says.
Unlike “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” which she describes as a reflective release, “Patterns” is active and in the moment. The album’s ‘The Heartbeat’ is about “analyzing yourself and the people you love most in order to grow.”
This is evident in the previously released song ‘Cowboys Cry Too’, featuring Noah Kahan – the only collaboration on the album and an empathetic look at toxic masculinity from a female perspective – and the new single ‘Sorry Mom’, which is released on Friday. It’s a swinging, guitar-pop confessional with intergenerational appeal that’s sure to strike a chord.
“It’s an intimate song,” she says. “The first line is, ‘Sorry mom, I smelled like cigarettes.’ You know, they’re the things your mother doesn’t really want to hear. But then you get to the chorus and the heart of it, and it’s a thank you letter to my mother for raising me the way she did.
“Sorry Mom” is one of many love songs on the album: like “Cowboys,” which was written for the men in her life, or a lush song about self-preservation and celebration called “First Rodeo,” which has a romantic theme. These are the kind of songs that can be realized in a safe writing and recording environment.
To create “Patterns,” Ballerini enlisted an all-female team. She co-produced and co-wrote the album with Alysa Vanderheym, and also collaborated with songwriters Jessie Jo Dillon, Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild and Hillary Lindsey. “I’ve never felt so safe making an album, from top to bottom. There was more pressure on this record just because of all the ears and eyeballs that ‘Welcome Mat’ got,” Ballerini says. “And so I wanted to make it safe without feeling the pressure from within.”
They continued writing retreats together, and the process “yielded something that felt streamlined without feeling too monotonous, and something that naturally exudes a lot of warmth, empathy and heart,” she says. “Because that’s what we do as women.”
That level of comfort also made exciting experiments possible. Ballerini is a country musician through and through, but she’s not afraid to take genre-bending risks, especially on this album. “For me, what makes me country without a doubt is my storytelling and my songwriting. And that will never waver or change. But as usual, I didn’t think about whether there was a banjo or a beat drop. And they’re both on this record, just like on my other ones,” she says. “I think lyrically and content-wise I was really just a team, with no rules. Nothing is forbidden.”
There are lighter songs here, and darker ones, self-discovery and uncertainty, as well as different geographies. New York and South Carolina are characters, Ballerini explores her “hair down, the human me and the more dressed, nervous, outward-looking me,” she says.
“My job is to make a record that has something for everyone. But that comes from making a record that is true to me, and that’s what I did,” she concludes. “And so I hope people feel something” as they listen. “Whatever it is.”
