Kelsea Ballerini Delivers Country Music’s Most Single-Minded D-I-V-O-R-C-E Record Ever With ‘Rolling Up the Welcome Mat’: Album Review
variety.comChris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic When Kelsea Ballerini did interviews last year for her largely upbeat “Subject to Change” album, she was in a tough spot, being in the public spotlight for her less cheerful personal state of affairs but having to affirm (as she did to Variety at the time), “It’s been pretty difficult, to show up and want to talk about a record that I love, and end up doing divorce press, you know?… This is not a divorce record.” And yet, six months later, Ballerini is back with the surprise drop of an EP that is so single-mindedly about that split, it’s nothing but a divorce record.
The only thing she’s got dibs on in “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat” is filing court papers. And it’s fairly shocking — in a good way — to hear her baring her post-marital soul on record so soon after seemingly placing limits on how far what she was going through at the time needed to make its way into her music.
Ballerini faced the quandary many country artists do: how to proceed in a genre where fans want to believe artists are keeping it real, when the realness has become a major mess.
Her solution to that, now, is an unexpectedly savvy one: parcel all that pain into a dam-burster of a side project with no commercial expectations, no press (“divorce press” or otherwise) and no holds barred, before presumably getting back to the sunny side of the street.
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