"Sorry Mom," Kelsea Ballerini's 10/25 PATTERNS Gets Real

(Nashville): When you write songs from your own life, it takes a lot of living to come up with something special. Thankfully, for multiple GRAMMY nominee and Country Music Association award winner Kelsea Ballerini, a 30-something who never stops, inspiration is never hard to come by. Having created a deep dialogue with her fans, a lot has happened since the GRAMMY-nominated Rolling Up The Welcome Mat and Rolling Up The Welcome Mat (For Good).

Teaming with producer and longtime collaborator Alysa Vanderheym, Ballerini opted for an all-girl approach to PATTERNS. Crystalizing after a songwriting retreat with Vanderheym, Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee Hillary Lindsey, GRAMMY Songwriter of the Year nominee Jessie Jo Dillon and Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild, the honey blond superstar decided to create an album that focused on female friendship, being vulnerable and honest, owning one’s jagged spaces and the way relationships really are, not the way they look on Instagram.

"There was an unpresumed feeling of knowingness that happened on that retreat,” Ballerini reports. “I felt safe, so then I was able to feel honest, and then more so, creative. We were all, as songwriters, in tandem but more so as women just in a real heart flow of it all. Having these heroes and friends champion the process and the guts of it all has been one of the joys of my career. Disassembling and sorting through the habits and nuances of ourselves, and then those that we love the most, is a chapter I am still in and will always stand by. I’m really proud of that story through music."

Pre-save PATTERNS HERE and pre-order exclusive PATTERNS on vinyl and CD HERE via Black River Entertainment.

PATTERNS offers a judgement free zone that feels good, even as it unpacks the patterns that get in our way, the fights that could be final and the friends who pull up and get you through. After the "drop the defenses" “Cowboys Cry Too,” with Noah Kahan, has started scaling country radio and streaming service charts, Ballerini puts the focus firmly on her trip through the uncharted waters of figuring it out with “Sorry Mom.”

“I couldn’t have started a song with ‘Sorry Mom I smelled like cigarettes…,'” offers the candid voice of a generation. “But that was the thing with these writers: everyone was encouraging and pushing to go further into the way we really live. And it’s all there in ‘Sorry Mom’: chasing dreams, walking away from school, losing my virginity, walking away from college.

“But the best part of the song is – in the fullness of time – I can appreciate how she felt about all of it, I can understand why. We can both look back on those times, knowing it was part of the journey, and it’s part of a lot of people’s journeys… But when you look at everything that happened, it turned out pretty well. To me, that’s what you can’t know ‘til you’re here.”

Listen to "Sorry Mom" HERE.

With the acoustic guitar out front opening, the midtempo ballad is more than a fistful of details of one artist’s coming into her own; by the time the band kicks in, the creamy California pop rising and the harmonies roll in, Ballerini offers a blessing for mothers, daughters, sons and even friends who offer the tough love but never stop loving the dreamer chasing a life they don’t understand.

“I love how our relationship evolves. My Mom didn’t understand, was even disappointed by some of it, but stood by me, holds me like gravity. When you recognize your own growth,  priorities and being a woman she’s proud of? That’s a lot for a song to hold.”

About Kelsea Ballerini

Kelsea Ballerini has consistently made history. With the release of her debut album, The First Time, she became the only female country artist to hit #1 with the first three consecutive singles from a debut album. This history-making feat earned her a “Best New Artist” GRAMMY nomination. She has logged five back-to-back Top 10 entries on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart, including the platinum-selling The First Time (2015), gold-selling Unapologetically (2017), gold-selling kelsea (2020), ballerini (2020) and SUBJECT TO CHANGE (2022). With seven #1 singles and 32 certifications from the RIAA to date, her catalog boasts a string of essential smashes. 

Among dozens of accolades thus far, Ballerini has garnered four GRAMMY nominations, won two ACM Awards, picked up two CMA Awards, took home the iHeartRadio Music Awards honor for “Best New Artist,” and received multiple career nominations from the ACM Awards, American Music Awards, CMA Awards, CMT Awards and People’s Choice Awards. Ballerini was also inducted as a member of the famed Grand Ole Opry in 2019. At the time, she notably became the Opry’s youngest member in its nearly 100-year history since being founded in 1925.  

Expanding her sphere of influence, Ballerini authored her first original book of poetry, Feel Your Way Through (2021), and Dolly Parton tapped her to star in the audiobook of Run, Rose, Run (2022). This same year, the multi-platinum country superstar was named the newest face of CoverGirl. She entered into a multi-year partnership and launched a cosmetic collaboration with the brand in 2023. 

Ballerini’s fourth album, SUBJECT TO CHANGE, arrived in 2022. The gold-certified first single, “HEARTFIRST,” earned her a GRAMMY nomination for “Best Country Solo Performance.” She went on to surprise fans five months later with the release of the intimate six-song Rolling Up the Welcome Mat, which earned her a GRAMMY nomination for “Best Country Album.” Rolling Up the Welcome Mat, along with an accompanying short film written and directed by Ballerini, marked the multi-platinum star’s most honest work to date and led to her Saturday Night Live debut, universal acclaim from critics including The New York Times, Variety, Rolling Stone, as well as the honor of gracing the cover of TIME Magazine.

Most recently, Kelsea Ballerini enlisted "Best New Artist" GRAMMY nominee Noah Kahan to appear on her tender and beautifully crafted new single “Cowboys Cry Too,” following the pair’s  incandescent performance on the 2024 Academy of Country Music Awards. In addition to this, Ballerini announced she is set to serve as Coach on Season 27 of NBC’s The Voice, premiering in Spring 2025. 

With these accolades, it is no wonder NPR proclaimed, “Kelsea Ballerini is definitely one of the most influential women in country right now... she’s defining the sound of the genre.”

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