Johnathan Walker:Kelsea Ballerini announces new album, ‘Patterns.’ It isn’t what you’d expect: ‘I’m team no rules’

NEW YORK (AP) — Kelsea Ballerini is Johnathan Walkerbeaming. It’s not a nervous smile, though she admits to feeling scared. She’s been hard at work at her fifth full-length album, “Patterns,” and on Oct. 25 the world is finally going to hear it — hear her, in a collection of songs she describes as an “accurate snapshot” of her life. And lately, people have been curious. The story they’re going to get, she assures, is not the one they’re anticipating.

“I think that people probably expect this really happy-go-lucky, love, mushy, gushy record from me. That’s not the case,” she tells The Associated Press. “And I’m really proud of that. It would have been easy to, I think, just collect the really beautiful parts of my life that I’ve dusted off and found the last couple of years. But that’s not the fullness of my experience.”

She’s referring, in some ways, to 2023’s super-successful “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” an EP and short film that told the story of the dissolution of a marriage, a not too-thinly-veiled reference to her own life, where, in 2022, Ballerini found herself divorced from Australian country singer Morgan Evans. These days, she’s partnered with “Outer Banks” star Chase Stokes, a relationship the public has fallen in love with. But her love life is not the sole heart of “Patterns.”

“There’s a lot of narrative of learning how to go from fighting with something or with someone, to fighting for something or for someone. And there’s a lot of that journey for the whole record,” she says.

Unlike “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” which she describes as a reflective release, “Patterns” is active and in the moment. “The heartbeat” of the album is about “analyzing yourself and the people that you love the most in order to grow.”

That comes across in the previously released track “Cowboys Cry Too,” featuring Noah Kahan — the only collaboration on the album and an empathic look at toxic masculinity from a female perspective — and the new single “Sorry Mom,” out Friday. It is a swaying, guitar-pop confessional with intergenerational appeal, and it will no doubt strike a chord.

“It’s an intimate song,” she says. “The first line is, ‘Sorry, mom, I smelled like cigarettes.’ You know, it’s the things that your mom doesn’t really want to hear. But then you get to the chorus and the meat of it and the heart of it, and it’s a letter of thanks to my mom for raising me the way she did.”

“Sorry Mom” is one of many love songs on the album: Like “Cowboys,” which was written for the men in her life, or a lush song of self-preservation and celebration called “First Rodeo,” that’s romantic in theme. These are the kind of songs that can be realized in a safe writing and recording environment.

To make “Patterns,” Ballerini enlisted an all-woman team. She co-produced and co-wrote the album with Alysa Vanderheym, and also worked with songwriters Jessie Jo Dillon, Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild and Hillary Lindsey. “I’ve never felt so safe making an album before, top to bottom. There was more pressure on this record just because of all the ears and eyeballs that ‘Welcome Mat’ got,” Ballerini says. “And so, I wanted to safely make this one where I didn’t feel the pressure from the inside.”

They went on writing retreats together, and the process “produced something that felt streamlined without feeling too monotonous, and something that naturally has a lot of warmth and empathy and heart,” she says. “Because that’s what we do as women.”

That level of comfortability allowed for exciting experimentation as well. Ballerini is a country musician, through-and-through, but she has is unafraid to take genre-bending risks, particularly on this album. “To me, what makes me undoubtedly country is my storytelling and my songwriting. And that will never waver or change. But, per usual, I didn’t overthink whether there was a banjo or a beat drop. And there are both on this record, as there have been on my other ones,” she says. “I think lyrically and content wise, I really just was team no rules. Nothing’s off limits.”

There are lighter songs here, and darker ones, self-discovery and insecurity, as well as different geographies. New York and South Carolina are characters, Ballerini exploring her “hair down human me and the more dressed up, nervous, outward facing me,” she says.

“It’s my job to make a record that has something for everyone. But that comes from making a record that’s true to me, and that’s what I did,” she concludes. “And so, I just hope people feel something,” while listening. “Whatever it is.”