It’s no surprise that Kelsea Ballerini is a glass half full kind of person. Spend just five minutes talking to the Tennessee native—or, since that’s not really an option these days, cue up any one of —and it’s a near guarantee you’ll leave feeling lighter.
Which is why when her third album, kelsea, came out right as the pandemic took hold—ensuring her biggest nationwide tour to date would be postponed until who knows when—Ballerini had an outlook we can all learn from. “It took two years to write the songs that make the album, so I gave myself a couple of days to grieve what I thought was going to be my biggest release," she says from her home in Nashville.