Current:Home > reviewsSurpassing:Kelsea Ballerini announces new album, ‘Patterns.’ It isn’t what you’d expect: ‘I’m team no rules’ -Capitatum
Surpassing:Kelsea Ballerini announces new album, ‘Patterns.’ It isn’t what you’d expect: ‘I’m team no rules’
SignalHub View
Date:2025-04-06 21:58:31
NEW YORK (AP) — Kelsea Ballerini is Surpassingbeaming. It’s not a nervous smile, though she admits to feeling scared. She’s been hard at work at her fifth full-length album, “Patterns,” and on Oct. 25 the world is finally going to hear it — hear her, in a collection of songs she describes as an “accurate snapshot” of her life. And lately, people have been curious. The story they’re going to get, she assures, is not the one they’re anticipating.
“I think that people probably expect this really happy-go-lucky, love, mushy, gushy record from me. That’s not the case,” she tells The Associated Press. “And I’m really proud of that. It would have been easy to, I think, just collect the really beautiful parts of my life that I’ve dusted off and found the last couple of years. But that’s not the fullness of my experience.”
She’s referring, in some ways, to 2023’s super-successful “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” an EP and short film that told the story of the dissolution of a marriage, a not too-thinly-veiled reference to her own life, where, in 2022, Ballerini found herself divorced from Australian country singer Morgan Evans. These days, she’s partnered with “Outer Banks” star Chase Stokes, a relationship the public has fallen in love with. But her love life is not the sole heart of “Patterns.”
“There’s a lot of narrative of learning how to go from fighting with something or with someone, to fighting for something or for someone. And there’s a lot of that journey for 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 heartbeat” of the album is about “analyzing yourself and the people that you love the most in order to grow.”
That comes across in the previously released track “Cowboys Cry Too,” featuring Noah Kahan — the only collaboration on the album and an empathic look at toxic masculinity from a female perspective — and the new single “Sorry Mom,” out Friday. It is a swaying, guitar-pop confessional with intergenerational appeal, and it will no doubt strike a chord.
“It’s an intimate song,” she says. “The first line is, ‘Sorry, mom, I smelled like cigarettes.’ You know, it’s the things that your mom doesn’t really want to hear. But then you get to the chorus and the meat of it and the heart of it, and it’s a letter of thanks to my mom 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 of self-preservation and celebration called “First Rodeo,” that’s romantic in theme. These are the kind of songs that can be realized in a safe writing and recording environment.
Ballerini performs during CMA Fest in Nashville, Tenn., on June 7, 2024. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP, File)
To make “Patterns,” Ballerini enlisted an all-woman team. She co-produced and co-wrote the album with Alysa Vanderheym, and also worked with songwriters Jessie Jo Dillon, Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild and Hillary Lindsey. “I’ve never felt so safe making an album before, 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 safely make this one where I didn’t feel the pressure from the inside.”
They went on writing retreats together, and the process “produced something that felt streamlined without feeling too monotonous, and something that naturally has a lot of warmth and empathy and heart,” she says. “Because that’s what we do as women.”
That level of comfortability allowed for exciting experimentation as well. Ballerini is a country musician, through-and-through, but she has is unafraid to take genre-bending risks, particularly on this album. “To me, what makes me undoubtedly country is my storytelling and my songwriting. And that will never waver or change. But, per usual, I didn’t overthink whether there was a banjo or a beat drop. And there are both on this record, as there have been on my other ones,” she says. “I think lyrically and content wise, I really just was team no rules. Nothing’s off limits.”
There are lighter songs here, and darker ones, self-discovery and insecurity, as well as different geographies. New York and South Carolina are characters, Ballerini exploring her “hair down human me and the more dressed up, nervous, outward facing me,” she says.
“It’s my job to make a record that has something for everyone. But that comes from making a record that’s true to me, and that’s what I did,” she concludes. “And so, I just hope people feel something,” while listening. “Whatever it is.”
veryGood! (3)
Related
- Billy Bean was an LGBTQ advocate and one of baseball's great heroes
- Fall in Love With These Under $100 Designer Michael Kors Handbags With an Extra 20% off Luxury Styles
- Martha Stewart Reveals She Cheated on Ex-Husband Andy Stewart in the Most Jaw-Dropping Way
- BrucePac recalls 10 million pounds of ready-to-eat meat: See list of 75 products affected
- Realtor group picks top 10 housing hot spots for 2025: Did your city make the list?
- Security guard gets no additional jail time in man’s Detroit-area mall death
- Does Apple's 'Submerged,' the first short film made for Vision Pro headset, sink or swim?
- Why Florence Pugh, Andrew Garfield say filming 'We Live in Time' was 'healing'
- The Daily Money: Spending more on holiday travel?
- Coats worn by Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, fashion icon and JFK Jr.'s wife, to be auctioned
Ranking
- Jorge Ramos reveals his final day with 'Noticiero Univision': 'It's been quite a ride'
- The brutal story behind California’s new Native American genocide education law
- 12 rescued from former Colorado gold mine after fatality during tour
- 10 players to buy low and sell high: Fantasy football Week 6
- British golfer Charley Hull blames injury, not lack of cigarettes, for poor Olympic start
- Texas lawmakers signal openness to expanding film incentive program
- Andy Cohen Reacts to NYE Demands After Anderson Cooper Gets Hit by Hurricane Milton Debris
- Martha Stewart Reveals She Cheated on Ex-Husband Andy Stewart in the Most Jaw-Dropping Way
Recommendation
A steeplechase record at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Then a proposal. (He said yes.)
Why Full House's Scott Curtis Avoided Candace Cameron Bure After First Kiss
Fall in Love With These Under $100 Designer Michael Kors Handbags With an Extra 20% off Luxury Styles
California pledged $500 million to help tenants preserve affordable housing. They didn’t get a dime.
How to watch new prequel series 'Dexter: Original Sin': Premiere date, cast, streaming
California man, woman bought gold bars to launder money in $54 million Medicare fraud: Feds
12 rescued from former Colorado gold mine after fatality during tour
How important is the Port of Tampa Bay? What to know as Hurricane Milton recovery beings