Kelsea Ballerini started writing songs when she was 13 years old, soon after Taylor Swift released her debut album in 2006. "From the beginning she's just been a huge influence for me," Ballerini said.
Ballerini grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, but after her parents divorced, she moved with her mother to Nashville in 2009 when Kelsea was 15. After a few semesters studying communications and marketing at Nashville's Lipscomb University, she signed a publishing deal with Black River Entertainment.
"I had 250 songs when I signed - then I wrote full-time for a year and a half," Ballerini told Billboard magazine. "When I was younger, I heard that for every 100 songs you write, you get 10 good ones and one hit - and that's proven to be so true. There's a lot of really, really terrible ones."
Her first single, "
Love Me Like You Mean It," was released in the summer of 2014 and became a hit in March 2015 when Taylor Swift tweeted: "Driving around with the @KelseaBallerini EP on repeat. SO lovely."
Ballerini said: "To have someone that you've looked up to for a long time admire your stuff and admire what you do is just a really big deal."
In 2015 Ballerini appeared on the Bravo reality show Southern Charm about South Carolina socialites, during which she bid $5,001 for a date with bachelor Craig Conover at an auction. The date, though, never happened.
"That was a spur-of-the-moment thing," she admitted, adding that it was her publicist who spurred her on. "In the end, I gifted the 'date' to a radio station to give away as a prize."
Kelsea Ballerini started dating the Australian country singer Morgan Evans in March 2016, and they were married on December 2, 2017 on the beach in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. It didn't last: Ballerini announced on August 29, 2022 that she and Evans were divorcing.
Evans made a big musical imprint: Much of Ballerini's 2017 album
Unapologetically, including the
title track, is about their happier times together, and a lot of her 2023 album
Rolling Up The Welcome Mat is about their split.
Ballerni grew up on a farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she was on the same land with her cousins, aunt and uncle. "We went to church twice a week and cooked fried chicken - the stereotypical country lifestyle," she told
American Songwriter.
During her rise in country music, Kelsea Ballerini got some advice from Taylor Swift that shaped her career: become "undeniable."
Ballerini, then a young artist on an independent label, was facing the challenges of establishing herself. Swift encouraged her to find her unique voice and create something so compelling that "no one can tell you no." Taking this advice to heart, Ballerini committed to building her sound, leading to multiple chart-topping hits.
Kelsea Ballerini made her prime time acting debut on the ABC medical drama series Doctor Odyssey. She played bride-to-be Lisa on the "I Always Cry At Weddings" episode, which premiered on November 7, 2024.
Ballerini has a few different tattoos, including one on her ribs that says "Love Love," with each word in the handwriting of her parents. She also has the word "Sunflower" on her back. Sunflowers grow toward the sun, an image that suits her. She said it represents "Growing within myself toward good things."
Ballerini was a sophomore at Central High School in Knoxville when on August 21, 2008, she saw a student pull out a gun and
shoot her classmate Ryan McDonald, killing him. Ballerini told this story at the CMT Awards on April 2, 2023, just days after a school shooting in Nashville killed six people.
She gets a lot out of therapy, which has helped her deal with an eating disorder and her divorce.
She started dating Chase Stokes, star of the TV series
Outer Banks, in January 2023 after sliding into his DMs with the line, "Hi Chase Stokes." He inspired some songs on her 2024 album
Patterns, including "
First Rodeo" and "How Much Do You Love Me?" Ballerini and Stokes called time on their relationship in the fall of 2025.
Ballerini embarked on her first arena tour - the Patterns Tour - in 2025. Country music at the time was dominated by men (mostly Morgan Wallen), with only a few women getting airplay (Lainey Wilson, Megan Moroney and Ella Langley among them).
Ballerini's first headlining arena tour came exactly 10 years after releasing her debut album. To make each night special, she limited the tour to 35 shows. Ballerini wanted to mentally document something unique in every city, so she went for quality over quantity.
Kelsea Ballerini started writing songs around the same time her parents divorced, and it became her emotional lifeline. She'd retreat to her room, scribbling down "all my very big feelings" and humming melodies to herself. That process,
she told Elle, "was my branch in the water that I just held on to and then got out." It's a habit she's continued; her most personal songs still start as private journal entries.
