Kelsea Ballerini goes on a 'first-name basis' on third album

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Kelsea Ballerini is an oversharer, both on social media and in songs, and those inner conversations, anxieties and obsessions show a country star navigating fame and pop music on her third album “kelsea.”

“I am loud and I talk too much,” Ballerini, 26, admits. “And it’s really because I am scared of the silence. I am scared of the alone time now. I am aware of that.”

She starts the highly personal record, out on Friday, with the song “overshare,” relating the time she got drunk and weepy in front of strangers and the other time she embarrassed herself in front of a celebrity (and no, she won’t name names.)

But Ballerini’s portrait of a young star straddling country and pop isn’t just an Instagram feed of famous friends and exotic locales. She’s cataloging insecurities that are just as relatable to the average person.

“I feel like it’s the album that is super self-aware and super open in a different way than I’ve been before,” said the Knoxville, Tennessee-native who is nominated for female artist of the year at the Academy of Country Music Awards, which was pushed back to the fall because of the coronavirus. “It’s the album that I keep saying puts me on a first-name basis with everyone.”

In addition to again co-writing every song on the album, she took on additional duties as a co-producer with Ross Copperman, Shane McAnally and Jimmy Robbins.

“Kelsea knows what she wants every track to sound like and she knows how she wants her vocal to sound, and what guitar parts she wants in there, down to the finest details,” said Copperman, who also co-wrote several of the songs.

While Ballerini is one of the few female artists to consistently get No. 1 country radio hits, she knows that many people still...