Kelsea Ballerini – to release new album ‘Patterns’ due October 25th featuring duet with Noah Kahan

When you write songs from your own life, it takes a lot of living to come up with something special. Thankfully, for multiple GRAMMY nominee and Country Music Association award winner Kelsea Ballerini, a 30-something who never stops, inspiration is never hard to come by. Having created a deep dialogue with her fans, a lot has happened since the GRAMMY-nominated Rolling Up The Welcome Mat in 2023.
 

Teaming with producer and longtime collaborator Alysa Vanderheym, Ballerini opted for an all-girl approach to PATTERNS (out October 25th via Black River Entertainment). Crystalizing after a songwriting retreat with Vanderheym, Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee Hillary Lindsey, GRAMMY Songwriter of the Year nominee Jessie Jo Dillon and Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild, the honey blond superstar decided to create an album that focused on female friendship, being vulnerable and honest, owning one’s jagged spaces and the way relationships really are, not the way they look on Instagram.
 
“There was an unpresumed feeling of knowingness that happened on that retreat,” Ballerini reports. “I felt safe, so then I was able to feel honest, and then more so, creative. We were all, as songwriters, in tandem but more so as women just in a real heart flow of it all. Having these heroes and friends champion the process and the guts of it all has been one of the joys of my career. Disassembling and sorting through the habits and nuances of ourselves, and then those that we love the most, is a chapter I am still in and will always stand by. I’m really proud of that story through music.”

PATTERNS offers a judgement free zone that feels good, even as it unpacks the patterns that get in our way, the fights that could be final and the friends who pull up and get you through. After the “drop the defences” ‘Cowboys Cry Too’, with Noah Kahan has started scaling country radio in America and streaming service charts, Ballerini puts the focus firmly on her trip through the uncharted waters of figuring it out with ‘Sorry Mom’.
 
“I couldn’t have started a song with ‘Sorry Mom I smelled like cigarettes…,’” offers the candid voice of a generation. “But that was the thing with these writers: everyone was encouraging and pushing to go further into the way we really live. And it’s all there in ‘Sorry Mom’: chasing dreams, walking away from school, losing my virginity, walking away from college.
 
“But the best part of the song is – in the fullness of time – I can appreciate how she felt about all of it, I can understand why. We can both look back on those times, knowing it was part of the journey, and it’s part of a lot of people’s journeys… But when you look at everything that happened, it turned out pretty well. To me, that’s what you can’t know ‘til you’re here.”

PATTERNS (out October 25th via Black River Entertainment)

Photo Credit: John Russo