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Kelsea Ballerini delivered a heartfelt message to her hometown crowd in Knoxville, Tennessee, reflecting on a whirlwind year of healing after heartache and the lessons it taught her. The Grammy Award-nominated singe-songwriter surprised fans with a video of a vulnerable rendition of “Leave Me Again,” when she performed it for a sold-out arena audience last month.
Ballerini said she’s sharing the video “as a little holiday treat and thank you for a year of heart mending sing alongs i’ll never forget.” Before she kicked off the stunning ballad, she spoke to the audience about her deeply personal EP and one of the most meaningful lessons she’s learned since:
“…life has a way of bringing you back to why you do what you do, and life did that for me. And I wrote an EP called Rolling Up The Welcome Mat about it. That has just changed my life in the most meaningful and unexpected way, and I just wanna say thank you for not looking away when things weren’t pretty, and thanks for showing up when I wasn’t really able to do it for myself. But I am now. Because I learned, out of all the lessons, the one thing I really learned is that I’ll never, ever leave me again.”
Ingrid Andress applauded the “a vulnerable moment we all had the privilege of witnessing,” she wrote in the comments alongside Ballerini's boyfriend and Outer Banks actor Chase Stokes and other Instagram users.
Ballerini debuted Rolling Up The Welcome Mat and an accompanying 20-minute short film on Valentine’s Day. Since then, audiences have embraced the EP, telling her story of heartache and healing after divorce, and inspired some of the updates on the extended version that released in August, Rolling Up The Welcome Mat (For Good). Ballerini premiered a music video for “How Do I Do This,” a song about learning to date again after the split, as she ends that chapter in her music. She’s since revealed a new song, “To The Men That Love Women After Heartbreak,” on the Grand Ole Opry stage.
“…I made the very impulsive decision to just put a chorus out on Thanksgiving, and I felt like I should just probably follow through,” Ballerini said on the Opry stage late last month, introducing surprise guests and co-writers Hilary Lindsey and Karen Fairchild to sing it with her. “The reality is, I’ve been singing about a chapter of my life that is far past me now. And I’m writing about the chapter of life that I’m in, and it looks very different, and I kind of wanted to share a bit of it now. I’m very gently and slowly starting to make the next record. I really want to take the time to handle it with care.”
Watch Ballerini’s performance of “Leave Me Again” from her sold-out homecoming show here: