Leaving The Rough Edges: Kelsea Ballerini Leads With Truth On ‘Patterns’ [Interview]
Kelsea Ballerini. Photo: Nyk Allen, Courtesy of Black River Entertainment
With her new album Patterns, her fifth project since her launch into country music with her 2014 single “Love Me Like You Mean It,” Kelsea Ballerini delivers an expansive excavation of her truth. Since earning her footing with five radio chart-toppers and multiple industry awards, she’s not only traveled skywards with her most recent projects, but she’s gone deeper, too.
Ballerini’s 2023 project Rolling Up The Welcome Mat, and its predecessor Subject To Change that was released just a few months earlier, marked a shift in her artistry. With the confidence of a genre-leading songwriter, Ballerini embraced a raw honesty, showing more of her true self—polished or not.
As her lyrics became more autobiographical and unfiltered, fans flocked to her music. Now, concertgoers fill rows, displaying her lyrics on posters, clothing and even their skin, “scream-singing,” as she puts it, the words alongside her.
On Patterns, Ballerini is in top form, sharing the realness, complications, acceptance and, ultimately, the wisdom that she’s earned in a 15-track opus of the female experience.
It’s no surprise that Patterns was created with four more of Music Row’s leading ladies, with all songs (other than Noah Kahan‘s verse on “Cowboys Cry Too”) co-written in some combination of Ballerini with Hillary Lindsey, Jessie Jo Dillon, Karen Fairchild and Alysa Vanderheym, who returned as the album’s producer.
Ballerini and Vanderheym began creating Patterns with the tracks “This Time Last Year” and “Cowboys Cry Too.” After the whirlwind of Rolling Up The Welcome Mat, she needed a break to reconnect with herself before starting her next project.
“I had to take a break and be back in my life and in my body—live some life to write about. Then I had to figure out what about Welcome Mat connected like it did, and how do I carry that forward into the present day and who I am now,” Ballerini shares with MusicRow.
“Honestly, I realized that I had accidentally been rounding the edges of my music for a long time. Even though it was about my life and my big feelings and everything felt very tailored to me, I was leaving out details because I wanted it to be for everyone. In Welcome Mat, I didn’t do that. I learned that that level of honesty somehow is more relatable and more connective.”
With this realization, she penned “Sorry Mom” during her first writing retreat with Vanderheym, Lindsey, Dillon and Fairchild. Starting with the line, “Sorry, Mom, I smelled like cigarettes, and my eyes were casa red with a pounding in my head showing up again on Sunday morning,” the song reveals truths she might have hesitated to share a few years ago.
“I’ve always struggled with being palatable and being for everyone. I’ve slowly and gently started to realize that no one is for everyone,” she says. “I do have opinions and I do talk like this—the last thing I ever want to be as a human or an artist is fake. Being surrounded by these women [helped me be brave enough to share]. They not only let me lead in these rooms, they encouraged me and wanted the DNA of this album to be mine with them supporting it.”
It quickly became clear to Ballerini that Patterns needed to be crafted within the sacred space of these female friendships. After writing “Sorry Mom,” “Baggage” and “Two Things,” she knew it was time to “lock the door” and keep this creative energy between them. Together, the five women brought Patterns to life, crafting songs that explore moving on after heartbreak, generational trauma, complex emotions, falling love, doing life your friends and appreciating growth.
In the spirit of unrelenting honesty, Ballerini says the songwriters went for truth even if it meant sacrificing a clever hook or twist of phrase.
“I used to think being a great songwriter meant figuring out the most clever way to say something. Now I think my version of being a great songwriter is asking, ‘What’s the most honest way to say this?'” she says. “There’s little payoff moments, like the bridge in ‘Wait!’ that gives you one little clever bit, and the rest is quite literally word vomit. That interests me more.”
After writing “How Much Do You Love Me,” Ballerini recognized an evolution in her songwriting that illustrates her radical acceptance of the truth.
“On songs like ‘Peter Pan,’ I always twist it to be in power. Even though I’m heartbroken through the song, at the very end, I say, ‘but you don’t know what you lost, boy.’ I always have to be in control.
“‘How Much Do You Love Me’ is one of the first songs where I’m not,” she says. “It reminds me of that movie scene where the girl says, ‘I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.’ Even that in itself is breaking a pattern.”
Lush and organic tracks like “First Rodeo,” “Baggage” and “Cowboys Cry Too” fit alongside seamlessly with “Wait!” and “Deep,” two pop-leaning songs on the album, because of their openness. Ballerini credits producer Vanderheym as an invaluable collaborator on the album’s myriad of sounds, creating a space that allows for both trust and fun.
“Whatever the healthiest version of codependent is, is how I feel with her musically. There’s such a trust that we’ve built and it’s easy—and most of all it is so fun,” Ballerini says. “There’s a real beauty about making record five and remembering that it’s supposed to be fun. She brought that out in me.”
Among the album’s standout moments, Ballerini recalls how Patterns’ title track emerged during a retreat in the Bahamas, when Lindsey spontaneously began strumming chords while the women were taking a break.
“Fresh out of the pool, she grabs the guitar, starts finding these chords and hums the chorus melody. Everyone immediately shut up. She started structurally singing parts of ‘Patterns,’ then I started singing words and Karen started,” she remembers. “It was like watching an Olympic athlete.”
Fairchild was instrumental in shaping “Two Things.”
“We got really stuck on that song. We wanted it to be a power ballad, but we wanted it to have a sense of urgency to it because that song is about an urgent moment in time,” Ballerini recalls. “We had written the verses and were trying to find a chorus that didn’t feel cheesy. She just sat up and sang the melody. She cracked the code.”
And as for Dillon, Ballerini praises her gift for observation. “I call her ‘The Scribe.’ She doesn’t miss a word, and her skill as an editor is invaluable. When we think a song’s done, she’ll challenge it—and she’s always right.”
With Patterns, Ballerini offers a generous, 46-minute journey into her world, wrapped in her conversational voice and a distinctly country-pop sound. Each track resonates with relatable stories of life’s highs and lows, reflecting why her fans carry her lyrics like personal mantras—captivated by her honesty, openness and gratitude.
Ballerini will continue celebrating the new music tomorrow night (Oct. 29) with a mega-release show at Madison Square Garden, which sold out in minutes. She will hit arenas for the first time on a new tour early next year.
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