NEW YORK — Kelsea Ballerini is beaming. 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.