The country star opens a new creative chapter
Seven-time and current Country Music Association Female Vocalist of the Year nominee Kelsea Ballerini teases her upcoming Mount Pleasant EP with the reflective “I Sit In Parks,” available now via Black River Entertainment. With an accompanying video capturing the country-pop forward songwriter considering choices, sacrifices, and real-life costs as she sits on a swing in a park. “Parks” continues Ballerini’s startling openness in unpacking her world for her art.
While much has been made of the willingness to live in the wide open, “Parks” delivers a whisper sweet vocal that takes an exceptionally private tour of this moment assessment. Weighing personal desires, the reality of achieving success and wondering about the things her friends are all experiencing, she coos, “I sit in parks, it breaks my heart/’Cause I see just how far I am from the things that I want…”
Ballerini faces the commitment and reality of what her peers are now living as she watches a young family spending a Saturday afternoon, playing and sharing a picnic. Maybe not, since KT Oslin’s Grammy and CMA Song of the Year “80s Ladies” has country music had such a deep truth about the state of the promise “you can have it all.”
“I have always made records – whether songs, EPs or albums – to capture a moment in time,” says the woman whose had a pair of both CMA and Grammy nominations for Country Album of the Year. “Mount Pleasant is a collection of six songs I’ve written throughout the summer, marking a chapter of heavy self-examination, longing and stepping further into who I am as a 32-year-old woman.”
After selling out her special Patterns release show at New York City’s iconic Madison Square Garden in minutes, Ballerini has continued forging a singular path of genre-blending – whether her acclaimed “Cowboys Cry, Too” with Noah Kahan or the CMA Vocal Event and Video “Half of My Hometown” with Country Music Hall of Famer Kenny Chesney – as she expands her role as the voice of a young woman negotiating responsibility and dreams.
Whether confessing “By now is it a lucid dream/ is it my fault for chasing things/A body clock doesn’t wait for/ I did the damn tour/It’s what I wanted, what I got/I spun around and then I stopped/ and wondered if I missed the mark?” or “I hit the vape, hallucinate a nursery with Noah’s ark,” Ballerini offers an even rawer vulnerability that offers no answers, only self-compassion. With a level of honesty unseen in the obsessive Instagram-jacked faux-reality, it’s another season of doubt, grace and moving through life for the East Tennessee voice of embrace where you are for the lessons and the journey.
