So, as I sadly bemoaned in last month’s post, My 2024 Live Music (In)Experience, last year was a total bust for me in terms of live concerts. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the New Year is starting off any differently, as my plans to catch Kelsea Ballerini’s first headlining tour in Milwaukee last night blew up at the last minute. Those are the breaks sometimes, and thankfully I’ve got a loaded calendar of other shows scheduled throughout the rest of 2025, so there are plenty of opportunities ahead to redeem last year’s pitiful showing.
Since I won’t be sharing the live review that I initially had planned for today, I decided to go an alternate route in terms of showing Ms. Ballerini a little love today at The 706. She was not an artist I paid much attention to upon her initial breakthrough as a barely post-teen country sweetheart in 2015. It wasn’t that I didn’t see any talent or potential there, it was just that I was well outside the target audience of such material. I felt similarly about Taylor Swift’s 2006 debut album, and I was only three years removed from high school graduation at that point. So by the time Ballerini arrived with The First Time, I was busy devoting most of my listening energy to Jason Isbell and Kacey Musgraves, and turning to the likes of Carrie Underwood, Zac Brown Band, and Little Big Town for my mid-2010s mainstream country chart fix.
But just like my trajectory as a Swiftie, my affinity for Kelsea’s music has grown as her own artistic range and human experience has. As you hope for with any artist that makes their debut just barely into adulthood, Ballerini’s first decade of music has been witness to a rewarding blossoming of her skills as a vocalist, lyricist, and stylist with deep influences on both sides of the country-pop coin. The varied trifecta that she opened the 2020s with (Kelsea, Subject to Change, Rolling Up the Welcome Mat) turned me into an official fan, and she’s been one of my bright spot artists in the mainstream realm (country and otherwise) ever since.
Below you will find a small selection of my Kelsea favorites, with each of her six album eras being represented. Hopefully I will get to see live versions of most, if not all of them very soon!
“Secondhand Smoke” from 2015’s The First Time
In the midst of the country-pop tart tracks that make up her shimmering debut album was this heart-wrenching clue that Ballerini was already nurturing a songcraft that was beyond her years. “Smoke” finds her unpacking the complicated memories and emotions of her parents’ divorce, and they cut straight to the bone: “Am I the product of a problem that I couldn’t change?/Got his eyes, got her hair/So do I get their mistakes?”. It’d be guttingly potent to hear her sing this track as a fully-matured artist side-by-side with the material from her own divorce project, Rolling Up the Welcome Mat. With that said, there’s something uniquely devastating in hearing her younger chops delivering this story, with the aching impact it had on her youth raw and right on the surface of the record.
“In Between” from 2017’s Unapologetically
Framed by her increasingly mature vocals, comforting piano keys, and soft-rock guitar fills that recall “More Than Words”, this is a buried, soft-spoken gem in her discography. A tender and unapologetically human reflection on that complicated emotional purgatory where one’s still trapped between their youth and adulthood.
“Homecoming Queen” from 2020’s Kelsea
I still vividly remember the precise moment in spring-time quarantine when I heard this track for the first time. To me, it felt like the moment where Kelsea Ballerini officially arrived as a fully-formed singer-songwriter to an elevated standard. It finds a narrator now removed enough from her teenaged experience to reflect upon it with a newfound clarity, and sage wisdom to guide someone going through the same thing. Narratively, it feels like the perfect middle-ground moment that could form a trilogy with Taylor Swift’s “Fifteen” and the overlooked Faith Hill/Lori McKenna classic, “Stealing Kisses”. There’s also a lingering sadness, accentuated by the “You Were Meant For Me”-tinged guitar licks, that reveals the bitter truth that many of these social strifes continue in their own way well into adulthood.
“Subject to Change” from 2022’s Subject to Change
This album produced my all-time fave of Kelsea’s cuts, “If You Go Down (I’m Going Down Too)”, but since my status as a stan for that song is well-documented on the blog already, I decided to go with a different selection. And, what a group of bangers and gems there are to choose from on this record, easily her most cohesively excellent to date. This title track opens the set with delicious and deliriously breezy country-pop aplomb. It serves as both a delightful and fresh piece of ear-candy, as well as a sturdy anthem for perseverance during life’s transitional moments, by now firmly established as the thematic core of her entire catalog.
“Penthouse” from 2023’s Rolling Up the Welcome Mat
Its status as a six-song EP couldn’t stop Rolling Up the Welcome Mat from becoming a career-changing moment for Ballerini, so pivotal an artistic breakthrough was her naked appraisal of her painful divorce from fellow country star, Morgan Evans. Its dreary, rainy-day imagery was such a juxtaposition to the bursting color and energy of Subject, and the fact that they reigned the charts simultaneously only further demonstrated the range that she had developed as a creative performer. This is the emotional centerpiece of the project, which is saying something given the sheer emotive power of the entire track-list. Her rendering of the harrowing chorus, and its piercing hook, is the sound of a young singer reaching the artistic heights that her whole career had been building to up to this point.
“Two Things” from 2024’s Patterns
In today’s ridiculously polarized society, it is indeed difficult to remember that the world is more complex than right and left or black and white. The life experience is a complex and layered one, littered with all sorts of curious contradictions. Romance and relationships remain the most central & classic examples of these truths, and Ballerini’s performance here perfectly captures all those messy and confusing emotions with refreshing intimacy.
The 706 
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