Words by Erandhi Mendis
I have only ever been to Tennessee once, but my time there told me that to be a woman in Nashville is to be everything at once. More than any other genre, country music asks female artists for contradictions: be accessible but also singular, demonstrate polish while showing vulnerability – be a fantasy but also a friend. Nashville’s machinery has a way of flattening women into archetypes long before they sign record deals. There is seemingly only room enough for one sweetheart, one siren, one songbird. It’s the reason country radio remains stubbornly uninterested in female voices – citing absence as evidence while sidelining anyone who tries to enter through the front door.
And yet, women continue to redefine the genre and carve out their own careers in spite of a system that pretends they aren’t the ones holding it together. Knoxville’s Kelsea Ballerini tightropes being everything to everyone with a practiced grace that suggests she’s fallen off it once or twice.
It’s her first time in Melbourne – though Australia is not unfamiliar territory. Her divorce to Australian country singer Morgan Evans in 2022 was so relentlessly picked apart by media and fans in equal measure, that it left people like me wondering if she would ever return. Two albums and EPs later, she walks onto stage after a deafening Man I Feel Like A Woman warm up, for night one of two sold out arena shows.
You’d be remiss (though it feels lazy, even for me) not to make the Eras Tour comparison with her green sparkly outfit – as though Swift herself had trademarked blonde hair, glitter and boots. Still, there is a funny sliding doors with Ballerini – she offers up an idea of what the life of a showgirl could have been in country music.
Not a self described extrovert but somehow the most natural of entertainers, Ballerini dots across the stage with the seasoned presence of a Country stalwart. Her discography reads like a coming of age diary made public – predictable given Nashville’s propensity for diarists, but Ballerini has stuck to leaning pop without leaving country with a level of faithfulness that has paved the way for contemporaries such as Megan Moroney and Ella Langley.
The first big moment of the evening is Baggage – the strongest single off her latest record Patterns. It’s visually enormous – flames fanning a triple screen set up showing piles of literal baggage. She tosses her guitar to a tech before leaning into what can only be described as electrifying crowd engagement – it is as though everybody here was present at soundcheck and is now enacting a perfect rehearsal of call and response. When I show my boyfriend the video of this moment after the concert he remarks that he is not sure he has seen this kind of noise from a crowd before – I agree, it is different from regular loud, it is remarkably crystal clear, particularly when she holds her arms out and everybody screams in perfect cadence “I wouldn’t want to do it with anybody else.”
Perhaps it is a combination of her fame and the size of the venue (is Margaret Court Arena too small for an artist of her stature?) but the last time I heard a singalong clear enough to be understood but deafening enough to be astonishing I think it was Billie Eilish in 2022 playing a venue with about double the capacity of Ballerini’s show. This also points to the way Ballerini writes songs – some of them feel created with the live show in mind. Baggage is one, a few songs later she starts line dancing, there is confetti raining during The Little Things and a quick deviation into twang territory she does If You Go Down I’m Going Down Too into Hole In The Bottle (which includes some theatrical acting from her backup singers). I decide at this point that this is my favourite size of show and level of renown to witness an artist in – the production value is high, the discography has breadth and the fans are lived in enough to hang on every word. It’s something to behold and although I have written before about the magic of arena shows for fans, I do believe we do not talk enough about how likely it is that artists who ‘fame out’ of these venues must miss this kind of stage when it is no longer feasible nor logical to play rooms of this size.
Country music is always intimate to some degree – emotional specificity on steroids. I suppose the difference (in many ways, the calling card) for Ballerini is how enmeshed her public life is with her artistry. Not that others avoid this, but there is protracted honesty here. The middle of the setlist takes a more melancholic shift to the glossy radio friendly opening. She grazes a few personal hits Blindsided and Mountain With A View but rewards the crowd with a surprise performance of I Quit Drinking (went platinum in Aus) before playing new single Emerald City and rounding out with a moving cover of I’m Not That Girl from Wicked. It’s perfect timing and quite heartwrenching with the news of an alleged end to a relationship that inspired much of the Patterns album. At this point I’m curious how deep Ballerini is going to get into the, at times, painful corners of her discography. She didn’t disappoint.
“Ain’t it like this town to only criticise a woman” she spits during Interlude. It is the fourth track off what I consider Ballerini’s opus, an EP titled Rolling Up The Welcome Mat – a devastating dissection of her marriage breakdown and eventual divorce. She sings five of the seven songs released with the extended edition – likely due to the immense success and critical acclaim of an EP that even she assumed would not reach the Grammys or the CMAs. The first time I heard this record I was on a tram and started crying in public during Leave Me Again – not my finest hour. But it gives you an indication of how impressively unrelenting and incisive the writing is. To write when hurt is easy, to write well while hurting is an art.
The intimacy continues as she walks through the crowd to a B-stage, holding hands and taking photos. She gives the audience an acoustic performance of newest release I Sit In Parks – a gorgeous stripped take on being a single, ambitious woman in her 30s grappling with wanting to be a mother and the looming confusion of running out of time. Relatable lol.
Bodyclocks are not a sexy subject to write about, but hearing Ballerini’s graceful execution reminds me that the tension of perceived motherhood is a relatively new one. For much of the past century, the expectation – social, economic, cultural – was that women could and would have children regardless of professional ambition. Thank you to Sharon Sandberg’s #girlboss era messaging. Motherhood was assumed, often unavoidable, folded into adult womanhood whether it arrived early, late, willingly or not.
But the lie has been unearthed now. As birth rates fall across much of the Western world and women delay or opt out of motherhood altogether, the choice feels heavier, more fraught. The question is no longer when you’ll have children, but whether – and at what cost. The luxury of choice has brought with it a quieter anxiety: the sense that time is finite, biology indifferent, and ambition unforgiving. It makes sense that the popstars have begun to articulate the same clock and confusion that governs the rest of us. In the past 18 months we have had Charli XCX sings “should I stop my birth control…my career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all,” or in the inverse – Lorde’s “wish I kept the Clearblue, I’d remember how it feels to be.” The trifecta complete now with Ballerini’s “I hit the vape, hallucinate a nursery…I wonder if she wants my freedom like I want to be a mother.”
It’s no surprise that a week after its release Rolling Stone picked up Parks as one of the best songs of 2025, calling it “the most honest country song of the year,” which feels on the nose since Ballerini name-checks the publication in the bridge. Is it more daring given the traditional timelines and Christian-inflected tropes of Nashville? Country has long celebrated marriage and motherhood as narrative end points – tidy resolutions where love and faith converge. To exist in some level of suspension outside that arc is radical in a genre that historically prizes an orthodox path for women.
But Ballerini is not a neat defector. Where a public divorce album labelled her outspoken and a desire to unpack topics of tension may ostracise an audience that already doesn’t hear her radioplay – her strength falls in being willing to narrow her audience in order to remain honest. She loves country and I suspect she will stay in Nashville for many years to come – quietly, deliberately pushing the genre forwards. When she surprises the audience with Half of My Hometown – her ballad with Tennessee hero Kenny Chesney, it is obvious this is where she belongs.
It is funny in hindsight to see such a breadth of sonic exploration – she can go from a radio friendly EDM feature with The Chainsmokers to a yee haw line dance straight into an acoustic heartbreak ballad without it sounding messy or disingenuous. I suppose this is the way we create modern popstars – we ask them to be diverse.
The end of the set bpm rises again briefly, she does Future Tripping, Muscle Memory (the only moment in the set where the mix is too loud and her vocal is muffled – a shame as it is such a fun track), dating banger How Do I Do This and suddenly we are at the climax.
@nikkigoesontour @Kelsea Ballerini Melbourne N1 🩷 #kelseaballerini #australia #concert #fypシ゚ #kelseaballeriniconcert
Her final song is Penthouse. In brackets, (Healed Version) – an additional release with slightly amended lyrics. The third song on the Rolling Up the Welcome Mat EP is a masterclass of emotional alchemy – she does not hold back. The song chronicles her marriage’s collapse, capturing the battle between lingering grief, self-reflection and the importance of a prenuptial agreement (it seems she didn’t have one). It is deeply personal in a way that demonstrates her country foundations and, for lack of a better term – it is a beautiful divorce anthem
A few nights prior on the tour someone had the idiotic sense to yell out “Team Morgan” during a lull in the bridge, to which Ballerini naturally responded “fuck off,” before noting “everybody is happy,” and later sharing on Instagram that if people continue to do this she would remove Penthouse from the setlist. Understandable. I was very glad she didn’t.
You see, like many of the other young women who screamed – to a deafening volume – the words “we got along real nice until I wanted out, now I know you hate me,” this song means something to me. And that above all else is why Ballerini will continue to sing it for crowds in spite of the obvious hurt it holds.
Above any other genre, country music has a profound understanding that the best stories hit hardest when they feel like they are told just for you. What does that say about an artist required to tightrope a hundred personas and excel at all of them? It’s clear she’s simply writing what she feels, amongst the convoluted and messy reality of life – it cuts through the saturation of polished pop music. Ballerini is reflective of a modern day country star – and in a broader sense, a modern day woman. Her live show is a triumph and hearing her punchy vocal ring out in the final refrain of Penthouse drives home that her success is compounded by her musical prowess.
“I bought the house that we saw – you said it was wrong,” she sings, “I wanted it all along.”
In Nashville, women are so often told which rooms they’re allowed to occupy, which house they should choose and how to be celebrated for everything except honesty. Ballerini’s most conquering rebellion is wanting all the contradictions, knowing the cost and singing about it anyway.
