Kelsea Ballerini Appears on ELLE’s 2025 May Digital Women in Music Cover

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For ELLE’s May 2025 Women in Music digital cover, country-pop star Kelsea Ballerini sits down with Fashion Features Director Véronique Hyland to reflect on the power of standing tall in her own success. After wrapping up her arena-headlining tour, a genre-expanding new album (PATTERNS), and her coaching debut on THE VOICE, the 31-year-old is no longer introducing herself, she’s owning the stage.

Two years after her ROLLING UP THE WELCOME MAT EP transformed heartbreak into healing and marked a bold new chapter in her career, Ballerini is now turning the page once again. Happily in love, creatively recharged, and unafraid to speak her truth, she opens up about working with an all-female songwriting crew, her relationship with vulnerability, and what it means to hold space for other women going through hard seasons. As she puts it, “I’ve been trying to stand in my success more and not make myself smaller. I think that’s a lesson for all women—to be really proud about our wins.”

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On releasing Rolling Up the Welcome Mat, chronicling her divorce from fellow country singer Morgan Evans and facing her fears about feeling ‘terrified’ head on:  For Ballerini, who grew up religious in Tennessee, the idea of divorce felt taboo, and dropping an album about it even more so. “I remember being like, ‘Oh man, I’m terrified.’ I went to sleep, and the next morning, I was like, ‘Oh, it’s okay. People are finding this and connecting with this.’ But it was definitely a scary feeling.”

On fans connecting with her after opening up about her divorce: Now she has fans come to her concerts with signs reading, “Just got a divorce.” She cautions that “I try to never celebrate it until I know if it’s a good thing. I don’t ever want to be a poster child for divorce. It’s been three years now. It’s simply not in the forefront of my life anymore. But I always make sure when these women come up to me, my first reaction is never, ‘Oh my God, congratulations!’ It’s like, ‘Are you okay?’ Because just like it needs to be destigmatized, I also don’t think it should be celebrated or glamorized.”

On finding peace in her personal life, including her relationship with Outer Banks actor Chase Stokes: These days, Ballerini is in a completely different headspace. Her personal life, she says, is “unrecognizable from how it was a couple of years ago, and thank God.”

On what’s next for her creatively, from genre-blending to her dream collaboration with SZA:“I intend to do more genre blending. That excites me.” She would “die” to work with SZA.

On embracing crossover moments in country music, as artists like Beyoncé, Zayn Malik, and Lana Del Rey enter the space: “If we, as country artists, feel like we can have a collab on top 40 or have a collab with an R&B artist, why wouldn’t we give a welcome to someone else? I think that’s where people who are pushing back really need to check themselves, because music is for everybody. And specifically country music, the marquee of it is it’s the people’s story.”

On outgrowing humility as a defense mechanism and standing in her success: Over the holidays a few years back, Ballerini says, she had dinner with her manager and asked, “‘What’s my blind spot? Where can I be better?’ And he said, ‘You need to stop acting like you’re new here.’ So I’ve been trying to stand in my success more and not make myself smaller. I think that’s a lesson for all women—to be really proud about our wins.”

On the importance of creating a safe space for fans: “Two days ago, we had a (drag) queen in the audience in Philly, and I felt so deeply grateful that they felt safe enough to be there in the theater in the wig. And that’s what I care about now. I want my sliver of the world of music—the 15,000 people who are out there—to know we’re aligned and we can be a safe place and keep going out into the world and trying to do the right thing. When I think about it on a wider scale, it’s too much. I don’t know where to start. But I know that I can start with me and how I show up within my community.”

On creating Patterns with an all-female songwriting team: Hillary Lindsey, Karen Fairchild, Jessie Jo Dillon, and Alysa Vanderheym: “The truth is, I was so frozen after Welcome Mat, because the intention behind that was not to be a commercial success in any capacity. It was literally just this six-song collection that I made quietly with one other person, Alysa, to the point where it didn’t even count toward my record contract. And then it connected like it did. So when it was time to make my ‘proper album,’ I didn’t know where to start, because I felt this pressure to follow it up and do it well. I had to really dissect what made that work and then ask, ‘How do I translate that to my life now?’ I knew that if I was going to start writing, I needed to do it with people I felt safe with. And so I called my friends, who are some of the most in-demand songwriters in music, but they’re also just my friends. I was like, ‘Hey, can we go away somewhere really cozy and cute for two days? I will supply so much wine, and can we just see if there’s anything? And if there isn’t, it’ll still be two days of womanhood.’ If that’s the worst-case scenario, we’re doing all right. We ended up writing ‘Sorry Mom,’ ‘Two Things,’ and ‘Baggage.’ And I was just like, ‘There it is.’I felt this immense relief and release, but also a sense of freedom that I had never really felt before. I keep saying it wasn’t just a co-write, it was walking life for a year with each other.”

On writing through life’s growing pains: “I’ve always gravitated toward writing about the unsteadiness in life, whether that’s a version of heartbreak or just growing pains. I love writing about growing up and the uncomfortable nature of that. The hardest part for me is to write when I’m happy, like you said. It’s so much easier, because songwriting is so therapeutic for me, to sit down when I’m down in the dumps about something rather than when I’m happy. Because when you’re happy, you want to go exist in your happiness, not sit down with your guitar. But I will say making Patterns was truly reflective of the year and a half that I wrote it. So there is turmoil and growing pains in that, and there is happiness, but it’s not sugarcoated.”

On achieving her dream of performing arenas: “It’s always been my goal to be a woman who headlines arenas. Especially in country music, you don’t see it a lot. I think that I, and my whole team collectively, had this ‘If not now, when?’ mentality.”

On finding her voice and choosing authenticity over appeasement: “I had to shift my mindset from wanting to speak to a wide audience to wanting to speak to my audience. I had to get out of my head, because I’m such a chronic people pleaser: Any element of turmoil or people being mad at me feels crippling to me. And so I never really was loud about anything for a really long time, because I just had to get my footing. And then I was like, “At the end of the day, I want the people who listen to my music to know what I stand for and hopefully align with it.”

[Photo Credit: Adrienne Raquel for ELLE Magazine]

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