Kelsea Ballerini, by her own admission, hasn’t been home to Nashville for a long time. She’s in a nondescript room in Los Angeles the day before her 31st birthday and is worried about her beloved Labradoodle, Dibs. He was recently diagnosed with inoperable cancer, just finished radiation, and had his first round of chemotherapy. The ordinarily bubbly Ballerini tears up talking about him.
Videos by American Songwriter
“We’re hoping for four months,” she says, explaining why he’s with her in Los Angeles. “He’s my little baby.”
Having to balance the devastation of Dibs’ prognosis with the elation tied to her career trajectory feels unnatural to Ballerini. She’s in Los Angeles while she films her first season as a coach on NBC’s The Voice. The East Tennesseean released her fifth album, Patterns, on October 25. She announced her first headlining date at Madison Square Garden and revealed it would double as her album release show. The singer used an emotional video heavily featuring Dibs in her MSG announcement but says she recorded it before she knew Dibs was sick. The pup loves frolicking around New York City.
“That city is landmarked throughout the album, Patterns,” she says. “A lot of the moments and inspiration happened while I spent time there. I wanted to honor that throughout the visuals of the record and then really bring it there to kick off the live element of it at Madison Square Garden.”
She describes Patterns as the sonic continuation of her Grammy-nominated EP Rolling Up the Welcome Mat, inspired by her divorce. Patterns may continue the songwriting integrity celebrated on Rolling Up the Welcome Mat but differs in every other way.
“I am very proud of that because I felt like after Welcome Mat, I had to go somewhere else,” she says. “And I think that’s what we did.”
Ballerini co-produced Patterns with friend, songwriter, and producer Alysa Vanderheym, with whom she recorded Rolling Up the Welcome Mat. She jokes she’s “fully musically co-dependent” on Vanderheym.
Patterns is Ballerini’s first full album since 2022 and arrived about 20 months after the EP. She feels like she got a slow start on the album but wanted to give herself a chance to live some life before trying to write songs about her next chapter. Ballerini filed for divorce from fellow country singer Morgan Evans in August of 2022 and went public with her current boyfriend, actor Chase Stokes, early the following year. She calls him the best “dog dad.”
When Ballerini was ready, she rounded up her “girls” to help her and Vanderheym write for the project. The singer’s creative go-tos include Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild, Grammy-nominated writer Jessie Jo Dillon, and Songwriter Hall of Famer Hillary Lindsey, who Ballerini says is “single-handedly the reason I’m a songwriter.”
“I think she’s truly just the chosen one,” Ballerini says. “She’s just a freak. She’s a freak of nature, and she doesn’t know that. And that’s one of my favorite things about her.”
Fate initially brought the women together, and because they are all her friends, Ballerini knew they were a safe place to start writing for the project. She asked each of them if they would join her at a songwriting retreat. The women prioritized it, and their schedules aligned.
“It came together pretty naturally,” Dillon tells American Songwriter of the album. “We’re all friends, and it just kind of started happening. It’s just really badass that it’s five chicks working on a record. Particularly, to me, at least, producing it on top of that is cool. At least in Nashville, there’s not a ton of female producers.”
They wrote “Sorry Mom,” “Two Things” and “Baggage” at the first retreat, and from there, Ballerini had a direction.
[RELATED: 3 of the Best Kelsea Ballerini Live Performances]
“I was like, ‘OK, that’s what it means now in this chapter of my life; this is what it looks like,’” she says. “It was after that retreat that I was like, ‘I’m going to lock the door, and I’m going to make this whole record with these women.’”
She wanted them to eat, live, sleep, and breathe the music together. That’s what they did, and Ballerini said it was comforting and empowering to thoughtfully craft such a personal record with others who felt the same way.
By the time Patterns was finished, they had gone to three songwriting retreats and worked on it in Nashville. The fact the women left their families to write with Ballerini is a sacrifice she doesn’t take lightly.
The singer co-wrote 14 of the 15 tracks with some combination of writers. She added Noah Kahan to the mix with Vanderheym for “Cowboys Cry Too.”
Dillon has writing credits on 11 of them.
“This album is her life,” Dillon says. “She’s an amazing writer. All the songs that you hear are all things that happened to her.”
The album touches on healing from divorce and details the ups and downs that come with a new relationship.
“I think people expected two things of me from this record,” Ballerini says. “One is for it to be pop, and one is for it to be soft and mushy, gushy and lovey. I was very defiant in not doing either of those things.”
[RELATED: Revisit These Kelsea Ballerini Songs for a Pick-Me-Up]
The singer/songwriter wanted to write about the love lessons she’s learned during her relationship with Stokes. Ballerini filed for divorce about two weeks before her 30th birthday. Starting her love life over as a full adult with another adult, she came to understand they both had big lives and big careers with different childhoods and different relationship histories.
“You put them together, there’s no world where that’s just going to be an easy journey,” she says. “I’m really proud of the way that not only we’ve walked with each other through figuring all of that out, but we’ve really challenged each other on the patterns of our pasts and which ones don’t serve us anymore. We’re at a place where it really works so beautifully now.”
Ballerini is gratified she shared outside of a love song—the one where they fought like hell and then fought for each other.
“It’s beautiful to have a partner that stands by that with me and supports that, too,” she says. “It would be really easy for me to make a record that’s like, ‘Oh, I got through the storm and now look at me. I’m all happy, and all the things are going great.’ But the journey through it, whether it’s the relationship or anything else that comes with growing up, there is nuance to that. And that’s always what’s appealed to me as a songwriter.”
The key, she says, goes back to the album’s title.
“One of my cute little fun patterns that I have in my life is that I leave before I get left,” she admits. “I write about that in the song, ‘Wait.’ It’s like a giant fear of abandonment. So, I do it so no one else can. And even when I tried to stay, it didn’t stick.”
She says she’s learned that sometimes she has to take a deep breath, talk to her therapist, and come back.
Ballerini knows Patterns is revealing and deeply personal. She feels like it had to be to uphold the standard she set for herself with Rolling Up the Welcome Mat. Her best friend, Kelly Bolton, told her that if she didn’t include “Beg for Your Love” on the album, she was doing her Grammy-nominated EP a disservice.
I’d follow you to the moon, babe / You know I’m ride or die for you / But if you want a chase, I won’t run / I ain’t gonna beg for your love.
Bolton told her: “I know it feels a little uncomfortable. You have to put that song on this album because that is the level of ‘Mountain With a View, ‘ Just Married,’ or ‘Penthouse.’ You got to do it.”
Bolton’s argument worked.
When it comes to “Sorry Mom,” Ballerini quips that “clearly, nothing is too honest.” The song’s first line is, Sorry, Mom, I smelled like cigarettes.
One of Ballerini’s favorite life changes is growing into womanhood and experiencing her relationship shift with her mom from mother-daughter to woman-to-woman. She feels like the song articulates that. Ballerini quotes the lyrics: Maybe I ran all the red lights / Maybe we got into a few fights.
“There are ways that we’re different,” she says. “There are different choices (Mom) would’ve made for me. But at the end of the day, I’m safe, and I’m growing up, and (she’s) proud of me, and I’m proud of (her). That’s what matters. It’s a love letter to my mom. It is very honest.”
Ballerini’s favorite compliment is when people tell her the song makes them want to call their mom.
“I’m like, ‘Perfect,’” she says.
“Wait” is another of Ballerini’s favorite songs on the album because she thinks her female fans will scream the lyrics, which she loves. She calls “First Rodeo” “production magic” and says “Patterns,” the title track, “is so sick.”
Every woman in her beloved girl songwriting-group has a writing credit on “Patterns,” which they wrote in the Bahamas. She remembers she had the title, and when she shared it, Lindsey grabbed her guitar.
“It’s like, ‘I’m 30. Here’s my life. Let’s take some inventory here,’” she says. “What do I like? How did I get here? What did I contribute? What do I like about that? What do I need to rewrite about that? The closest people around me, is this healthy? What needs to change? Can I challenge that? It was all that.”
Musically, the song took a Fleetwood Mac-sounding path, which is new for Ballerini. She planned to title the album Did You Make It Home. But when they wrote “Patterns,” she says it “immediately kind of flipped everything on its head.”
“I was like, ‘If people think that they know what to expect, they’ll put on Patterns, and Track One will kindly let them know that it’s different,” she says. “I always thought of patterns as a very negative word. In writing that song, and then certainly now and talking about the record, my life has some amazing patterns. There are some that could be toxic. And it’s not a bad thing. It’s just a series of habits. Some are in our blood, some are developed, not all are bad.”
Main photo by John Russo
Leave a Reply
Only members can comment. Become a member. Already a member? Log in.