Kelsea Ballerini On Her MSG Sellout, Breaking ‘Patterns’ & Conquering Known Universe (Cover)

Kelsea Ballerini’s career will hit a new level Oct. 29 when she plays a sold-out record release party at New York City’s Madison Square Garden for her new album, Patterns (out today [Oct. 25] on Black River Ent.). Between her performance and album release, she’s taking over New York City with multiple television appearances, including “Today,” “Sunday Today with Willie Geist,” “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon” and “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” Oct. 29 is turning into a de facto – if not official – Kelsea Ballerini Day in NYC.

While playing “The World’s Most Famous Arena” marks a massive leap forward, this luminous country singer/songwriter is in no way, shape or form an overnight sensation.

“It’s been a very slow, steady build for 10 years,” Ballerina tells Pollstar. “And I truly didn’t skip any steps. I opened in clubs and then theaters and then amphitheaters and then arenas. And then I went back and I headlined every single one of those. This is the stuff that I’ve always been really protective of, wanting to do it at the right time, but always really eager to do it and hoping that one day I could. So it feels like a massive bucket list mark off to do this.”

The Garden actually isn’t the country singer/songwriter’s first arena headline – that came last year on Nov. 2, 2023 at Thompson-Boling Arena.

“My first big arena show was last year in Knoxville, Tennessee, my hometown. That was how I chose to jump to arenas,” Ballerini says. “It was very important to me to go back home to do that. But with Madison Square Garden being the album release show, thematically and with the album, I talk a lot about New York City. Visually, we shot some of the videos there, so it’s very branded with the album.”

It may seem impossible that Ballerini only last year headlined her first arena. She’s been a major presence these last few years, not just in Nashville but around the globe, thanks to her many televised appearances and commercials, in addition to four previous albums, two EPs, and 14 singles.

Named one of Country Music Television’s “Next Women of Country” in 2014, Ballerini is now one of today’s most prominent country women, hosting the “CMA Festival: Country’s Night To Rock” TV special with Thomas Rhett from 2017-19, and since 2021 has hosted or co-hosted the CMT Music Awards, and will again in 2025.

Ballerini also appeared with Halsey on “CMT Crossroads,” was a guest judge on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and appeared on “Sesame Street.” In 2023, Ballerini adorned the cover of Time magazine’s TIME100 Next issue listing the most impactful young people in the world and performed on “Saturday Night Live.” Ballerini’s also a brand ambassador for CoverGirl and Pantene beauty products. And, perhaps in one of her most high-profile appearances, she will be a judge on next season’s “The Voice,” which will air in the spring 2025.

And then there’s her brilliant music and sublime voice, which all her success is predicated upon.

Ballerini’s first album, 2015’s The First Time, reached RIAA Platinum certification and two others, Unapologetically and Kelsea, are certified Gold. Of her 14 singles, the first three all reached No. 1 on the Billboard Country Airplay chart, making Ballerini the first female artist since Wynonna Judd in 1992 to do so. The third, “Peter Pan,” made Ballerini the first woman to top the Country Airplay and Hot Country Songs charts simultaneously.

Her newest album, Patterns, reflects Ballerini’s continued journey of self-discovery and fearless determination to take control of her life and work. She called on an all-woman team to create the album, co-producing and co-writing the album with Alysa Vanderheym, with writing assistance from Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee Hillary Lindsey, Grammy Songwriter of the Year nominee Jessie Jo Dillon and Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild.

There’s a nod to men, too. The album’s first single, “Cowboys Cry Too,” a collaboration with singer/songwriter wunderkind Noah Kahan, addresses the subject of masculine toxicity and was released in June.

“Cowboys Cry Too” was the most-added song at country radio upon release, according to Country Aircheck Weekly, and debuted at No. 27 on Billboard Country Airplay chart the week of July 6, and No. 16 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart the following week. It debuted at No. 50 on the Billboard Hot 100 all-genre chart. That was followed by the confessional ballad “Sorry Mom,” released Aug. 14 to effusive critical raves.

The release of Patterns follows by two years her album Subject To Change, which served as a hint of what was happening in Ballerini’s personal life. The singer split from her husband of five years, Australian country singer Morgan Evans, a month before the album’s September 2022 release.

Ballerini has been open about the turmoil in her life, including a childhood that included her parents’ divorce and her witnessing the shooting of a classmate in an Aug. 21, 2008 school shooting at Central High School in Knoxville. Fifteen years later, and as her marriage was dissolving, she would take the stage at the CMT Music Awards and honor victims of yet another mass shooting, at Nashville’s Covenant School just a week earlier.

“I wanted to personally stand up here and share this moment because on Aug. 21, 2008, I watched Ryan McDonald, my 15-year-old classmate at Central High School, lose his life to a gun in our cafeteria,” Ballerini said.

She turned to writing poetry to cope with life trauma, publishing “Feel Your Way Through: A Book Of Poetry” in 2021, described as revolving around “the emotions, struggles, and experiences of finding your voice and confidence as a woman.”

She released a short film and EP, Rolling Up The Welcome Mat, on Valentine’s Day in 2023. The recording marked a maturation from the pop country Ballerini had long been associated with, with tracks including “Blindsided,” “Penthouse” and “Leave Me Again” which show both candor and vulnerability as well as her confidence, strength and self-empowerment. The album deservedly was nominated for Album of the Year at the 57th Annual CMA Awards and Best Country Album at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards.

“Writing was the thing that got me through,” Ballerini says. “I wrote my first song when I was 12, when my parents were getting divorced. … I think Rolling Up The Welcome Mat in that chapter of my life really got me back to that place. Just a girl that needed to put her big feelings somewhere safe.”

And then Ballerini went back out on the road in a major fashion and got an advanced education in touring: opening for her longtime friend Kenny Chesney’s 2023 “I Go Back” tour. Across 22 shows, the tour grossed $27,627,383 from 244,056 reported to Pollstar from 22 shows.

“Being on that tour was like a master class in touring,” Ballerini says. “But Kenny is like family – we’re both from Knoxville and already had that relationship. On tour, he is so generous with his stage and time and audience. I knew that was the last time I was going to open, because I was going to jump to headlining. And I was so grateful that was the opportunity that I was having because I was actively learning.”

She followed that with a tour of her own, including sellouts at theaters and outdoor venues including at Outlaw Field at The Idaho Botanical Garden in Boise (4,285 tickets sold, $270,056 gross); Fox Theater in Oakland (2,980; $185,441) and capped by her hometown finale at Thompson-Boling Arena that sold out 14,460 tickets for a gross of $1,368,937 as reported to Pollstar.

“I love how bold she is, because when we were talking about this big idea, she just nailed it going like when we did Knoxville,” says manager Sandbox Entertainment’s Leslie Cohea. “I wanted to end that last tour with a big bang of an arena show, to show that we were coming back in arenas. It takes a special artist to do a whole production, put it into an arena and play it for the first time ever on such a big show.”

And shows don’t get much bigger than at 19,500-cap Madison Square Garden. “It’s certainly the first of its kind in the world,” says CAA’s Co-Head of Global Touring Rick Roskin. “It’s the biggest market in the country, and a one-off at Madison Square Garden is a complex one. It’s definitely an incredible play, and it’s involved.”

And booking a country artist in the Big Apple, without a record of big arena plays, is not without its risks, Roskin acknowledges. The risk paid off, as Ballerini’s album release show, a full house, sold out at the onsale.

“I knew going into this moment that the Garden really was the strategy and what the team at AEG and Sandbox Entertainment have done with their energy and involvement is to bring Kelsea from [Thompson-Boling Arena] in Knoxville around to a new program,” Roskin says.

“From the jump. I’ve always wanted to play arenas, and I think it’s because when I was a kid, the first concert I ever saw was Britney Spears at Thompson-Boling Arena,” Ballerini says. “Having that magical moment, in that size room, and seeing all the production was my dream. I grew up going to concerts like Taylor Swift and Shania Twain and they created this atmosphere in this world, where their music took on a whole different life.

“When I signed my record deal, [Black River CEO] Gordon Kerr asked me, ‘What’s your dream?’ I was like 20 years old. I said, ‘I want to come up on a hydraulic lift in an arena and put on a show that’s mine.’ And he laughed at me! But he believed in me. He said, ‘That’s so funny that it is your specific dream.’ And it has been.”

AEG Presents’ promoter Adam Weiser has traveled parallel roads for nearly a decade with Ballerini. Both started at the club level where Weiser was promoting shows and she was performing them and he well remembers a career inflection point.

“We took an elevated step to 2,000- to 4,000-cap venues and built that out,” Weiser says. “And now we’re going into, as I like to say, her ‘big girl tour’ and being able to navigate that. But we’ve been working together in some capacity since 2015. We kept connecting and bumping into each other in every aspect. I work from the heart, and so does she.”

Ballerini’s gradual climb to the arena-headlining level has been strategic. Despite her level of celebrity, given the TV appearances and lifestyle branding that has brought her to a global audience, she’s been disciplined in making her dream come true and has surrounded herself with consummate professionals.

Ballerini’s team, which includes agent Roskin and managers Cohea, Jason Owen, Jake Basden and Daisy Seymour of Sandbox Entertainment, as well as AEG’s Weiser, have meticulously plotted out the next phase of Ballerini’s career, including a 30-date “Live On Tour” arena run of North American cities in the spring.

The tour kicks off Jan. 21 at Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and makes major stops at Chicago’s United Center; TD Garden in Boston; Scotiabank Arena in Toronto, Canada; L.A.’s Crypto.com Arena; T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas and more before winding down at Denver’s Ball Center on March 30.

As for her Madison Square Garden party, Ballerini says, “I’m playing the album top to bottom for the first time ever and then playing another big group of songs that have been around for the last 10 years with me. So it’s a bit of everything for people, but production-wise, it’s all brand-new and it’s been so much fun to build out this vision and make it as big as we can.”