Kelsea Ballerini is embarking on her first arena-headlining tour that will bring the country artist to St. Louis’ Enterprise Center on April 4.
“It’s my first big girl tour,” Ballerini says. “It’s been something that’s sat at the very tippity-top of my bucket list since I was 13, and now I get to do it in real life, and I’m just so proud of the journey to be able to get to this place.”
That tour features a setlist that reaches back to her earliest singles, such as “Peter Pan.” It also has a couple of her favorite songs that weren’t singles and includes three of the six songs from her 2023 EP, as well as half of “Patterns,” her first chart-topping country album that hit No. 4 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart.
That’s plenty of music. But, Ballerini says, she feels she needs to deliver a show with all of the elements — production and everything in between.
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“That’s where the pressure for me comes from,” she says. “I really wanted to make sure that it feels like an arena-worthy show.”
Reviews and fan reaction confirm that, for close to the three months, she’s delivered a crowd-pleasing arena-level show — a process she’s documented, on stage and off, in her social media posts.
“I feel like I’m a chronic over-sharer, and I always have been,” Ballerini says of her social media activity. “I’m starting to get a little bit better about it as I get older, like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna keep this for me.’ But, I enjoy sharing my life, whether it’s my dog, or the kind of backstage ins and outs of rehearsals, or parts of my relationship, whatever it may be.
“It’s a way that people can get to know the person behind the music, and maybe they can hear the music differently,” she adds.
People, it appears, have heard and responded to the music on Ballerini’s past two records as differently as they were created.
“‘Rolling up the Welcome Mat,’ the EP that I put out a couple years ago, really changed everything for me, outwardly in my career, but also the way that I make music now,” Ballerini says. “I did not go into making that thinking, ‘OK, this is going to be my commercial country record.’ I didn’t even tell my label or my team that I was making it. I just made it because I had to for me, selfishly. It caught fire and connected in a different way than any music I ever put out.”
The songs that connected were the most honest and personal of Ballerini’s career, filled with details of her life — as in, to choose one, “Sorry Mom,” from “Patterns.”
“The first line of that song is, ‘Sorry, Mom, I smell like cigarettes, and I had sex before I got married,’” she says. “Those are conversations that I have with my friends in real life. Why would I not open that forum for a bigger conversation for people to have in their lives?
“That taught me to just lead with the truth and don’t round the edges,” she continued. “I’ve always written about my life, but I would more or less leave out details, because in my brain, I was like, ‘Oh, this will make it more inviting to everyone … ‘Welcome’ taught me the more personal I can get to, like the more connected it is, somehow, like the more universal it is.”
Ballerini, however, couldn’t have learned that lesson had she not come to another freeing realization that came years into her career.
“Truthfully, I think I’ve gotten to a place where I’m really comfortable that my music is not for everyone,” she says. “I used to be so gutted if someone was like, ‘I don’t like your music,’ or ‘You’re not country,’ or any kind of negative response to me. Now I’m like, ‘Wait a second, my music is subjective. There’s no artist that everyone loves, maybe, except for Taylor Swift.’”
The “you’re not country” slam has lost some of its sting in the decade since Ballerini signed her first record deal as country listeners and, critically, country radio have embraced artists and records that spin elements of hip-hop, pop, rock and R&B into the genre’s mix.
So where does Ballerini’s hybrid of pop and country come from?
“I grew up on a farm in east Tennessee and my first concert was Britney Spears,” Ballerini says. “That is my music in a nutshell.”
Ballerini has seen her fan base, musical credibility and visibility steadily increase since then, with a Grammy nomination for “Cowboys Cry Too,” her duet with Noah Kahan. She’s also a coach on “The Voice,” a singing competition show.
Ballerini had been an adviser and filled in for Kelly Clarkson in the big red chair. She then campaigned, in a sense, to be on the show’s 27th season and so far has found the experience very rewarding.
“I, obviously, have never been on TV in that capacity, and just to take on that new role as a mentor and someone that is trying to help people on their own journey really pushed me out of my comfort zone,” she says. “I really enjoyed it.”
In a social media post, Ballerini writes that her goal for 2025 “is to try to find some comfort, in the loud and quiet, public and private movements... I love a little chaos. I just wonder how it pairs with a little peace.”
She might find that out in June, after a few months of what she calls “controlled chaos.”
“I have the tour, and then we do the live shows for ‘The Voice,’” she says. “After that, I have no idea what the rest of my year looks like. So I think if I can just stay in a really good spirit for a couple months, then I’ll come up for air and figure out what’s next.”