The frankly underrated Grammy-nominated singer, Kelsea Ballerini, has blessed us once again with an angelic, vulnerable EP: “Mount Pleasant.”
Each track feels like her therapy session, in the best way possible. You can tell when some artists just write to get an album out and Ballerini isn’t one of them. It’s what separates a singer and an artist.
I’ve been a fan of hers since I saw her on Disney Channel’s “Next Big Thing” when her first album came out in 2015. That album, “The First Time,” didn’t showcase her writing talent. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great album, but you can tell she’s not the same artist who wrote it.
She’s been developing into a new, more vulnerable artist. We started seeing it in her 2020 albums “Kelsea” and “Ballerini,” which have the same songs, with “Ballerini” being the acoustic version.
We can see her start to open up a little more, specifically in tracks like “homecoming queen?,” “half of my hometown (feat. Kenny Chesney)” and “the way i used to.” Funny enough, her first track on that album is called “overshare.” Never stop oversharing. Ever.
When her EP, “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” dropped in February 2023, I was coming to terms with the fact that I needed to leave my long-term boyfriend. So, obviously, that album about her divorce to country singer Morgan Evans got me through a lot.
Ballerini released her most recent EP, titled “Mount Pleasant,” on Nov. 14, and she did not disappoint. Her lyricism is next level, and she’s clearly singing from her heart.
Now, if you haven’t been paying attention to the circle of drama that’s transpired over the past couple of months, let me catch you up.
Madelyn Cline and Chase Stokes, two of the main cast members of “Outer Banks,” dated for a year before they split in 2021. They continue to work together on the show, where they are still love interests. Stokes and Ballerni started dating in 2023, but called it quits this year.
They split on good terms, but it seems some issues were just too mentally draining to overcome, and we hear that in the album.
So what does the title have to do with any of this? Mount Pleasant is in Charleston County, South Carolina, where Cline, Stokes and the rest of the “Outer Banks” cast filmed the show, which basically leaves no speculation needed that this album is mostly about her feelings in that relationship, and out of it.
But I think it would be a shame to just say that this album is about that relationship, and only that relationship. This album is about her feelings as a woman.
The opening song in the EP, “I Sit in Parks,” is the best example of this. She sings, “Did I miss it? By now is it a lucid dream?/ Is it my fault for chasing things a body clock doesn’t wait for?”
It’s hard as a woman to want to focus on yourself when you have people constantly reminding you about the “biological clock” that’s ticking to have children.
It’s one thing if you don’t want kids, and you can focus on your career. But when you want a family, but you also want to do what you can in your “prime,” there is no right answer on how to deal with that, and it’s maddening.
I’m afraid that if I continue to work as hard as I do, and go at the speed that I’m going professionally, I won’t pause until it’s too late. The fear of missing out on motherhood because you’re focusing on yourself doesn’t just hit when you’re in your thirties. I’m barely 20, and it eats me up when I think about it for too long.
In another line, she sings, “They lay on a blanket, and God damn it, he loves her/I wonder if she wants my freedom like I want to be a mother.”
I went into college thinking I was with the love of my life — the guy I was going to marry. A part of me hung onto that godforsaken relationship as long as I did because, I think, in the back of my mind, in my subconscious, I still had that timeline gnawing at me.
The next song, “People Pleaser,” talks about making decisions and changing your personality for everyone else. Almost every decision you’ve made has been based on what other people want, so when all is said and done, you don’t know yourself, because your personality has been molded to please other people.
The next songs, “Emerald City” and “587,” are where we really get a taste of that post-breakup pain.
Some people took “Emerald City” as a diss to Cline. It just wasn’t. This song was about how destructive jealousy is to yourself and your relationship. She knows it’s a toxic mindset, and she feels horrible about it; that’s why she keeps repeating that her “true colors” come out — it’s guilt.
It’s realistic. Yeah, we hate when women put down other women, but we also hate ourselves when we do it internally. Especially when we know we don’t have a reason to. If that’s the mindset you’re in, you have to force yourself out of it, and it’s hard.
“587” is also about the relationship. The distance between Mount Pleasant and Nashville, Tennessee, where Ballerini usually is, is around 587 miles. The song, opening up with “Where you at?” reminds me a lot of “Mountain With a View” from her EP, “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” about her divorce, where she sings, “I wonder if you even know where I am.” We can see the similar patterns that took place in both breakups, the way she might’ve too.
The second-to-last song, “The Revisionist,” digs into having to accept bad decisions that you’ve made, no matter how much you want to go back and “call the Revisionist.”
In the last song, “Check on Your Friends,” she sings, “Pretty far from the girl that she was when she was twenty-four.” It seems like it’s more about her own story than a general message. The beat of this song gives me that old Lady A-type, older country vibe, which gives it a comforting touch to such a heavy song.
Ballerini’s work is always filled with emotional depth and, at least for me, gut-wrenching relatability. It’s why I’ll sit in parks and continue to listen to Kelsea Ballerini’s poetic lyricism.
