How therapy helped country star Kelsea Ballerini get through divorce and a school shooting

Country star Kelsea Ballerini knows therapy. Not just the kind that comes with spilling your guts out with songwriting. But those go-to-the-shrink confabs, as well.

In her youth, she twice had mandatory therapy sessions — after dealing with her parents’ divorce when she was 12 and after witnessing a fatal shooting at her Knoxville high school when she was 15. Then she resumed therapy by choice as a successful Nashville star.

“I didn’t have a great relationship with therapy until it was my decision to go, which happened when I was 24,” said Ballerini, who headlines Friday at Target Center. “I want to navigate my life and my career well, and be proud of it all. And I needed help with that. I’m pretty religious about it, and I try to do it at least a couple times a month.”

Of course, songwriting is part of her therapy process. What’s more therapeutic for the 31-year-old — songwriting or therapy sessions?

“Sometimes I don’t know exactly what I’m feeling until I write about it and then bring it to my girl, my therapist,” she said, sitting outside her Nashville home last week. “I never bring song ideas to therapy. Separation of church and state.”

Ballerini’s last two recording projects have been highly personal and clearly therapeutic — 2023′s diaristic going-through-a-divorce “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat” and last fall’s I-fell-in-love-again “Patterns.” She sees the new album — co-written with three women songwriting friends — as a continuation of her story.

“Luckily, I’m not in that chapter of turmoil and reflection. ‘Patterns’ is a really present album. It’s getting into my 30s and getting into a new relationship and assessing my own patterns and all that detangling.”

To celebrate “Patterns,” Ballerini presented a release party at the world’s most famous arena — New York’s Madison Square Garden — by playing the entire album live and then offering several of her hits.

“I’ve always been a pretty ambitious person and I like to swing for the fences and take a lot of chances but even that one, when the idea was presented to me, that one felt a little too ambitious for even me,” she admitted of the New York City release concert. “Making the jump to arenas — I’d only headlined one arena before that – and doing it only four days after the album comes out and playing the album top to bottom, that’s a lot of new, new, new all at once.”

Don’t expect to hear all of “Patterns” at Target Center, only the third of 36 cities on her first arena headlining tour.

She viewed Madison Square Garden as a test for which songs on “Patterns” connected and then she built a set list for the tour. The concert will unfold in three acts — the first “girly, bright and fun,” the second “female rage” and the third “super heartfelt.”

The set list will include some tunes from “Welcome Mat,” even though Ballerini conceived that seven-song record for therapy, not for the stage.

“When I put out ‘Welcome Mat,’ my intention was to never play any of it live. And the project just took on a life far bigger than I ever imagined. I look forward to singing those songs in the set now but it’s for the people who are there. I don’t attach what made me write the song to singing the song anymore.”

The first single from “Patterns,” “Sorry Mom,” gives detailed apologies to the singer’s mother for smoking cigarettes, dropping out of college after two years and missing Mom’s 58th birthday. Maybe Ballerini was feeling guilty because she lived with Mom while going through her divorce from Aussie country singer Morgan Evans in 2022.

“I definitely think that chapter allowed her and I to go from a mother/daughter dynamic to much more like a woman-to-woman dynamic and have more adult conversations,” Ballerini said. “When you’re watching someone go through something that’s difficult and you’re in close proximity, you can’t hide anything. I couldn’t hide if I was emotional, or I was upset or whatever version I was feeling. I think that opened up our relationship in a beautiful way.”

Ballerini’s current single, the self-explanatory “Cowboys Cry Too,” features Vermont pop singer Noah Kahan, not exactly known as a cowboy in his home state of Vermont.

“He’s like a Northeastern cowboy. He has such a love for where he’s from. You hear it all over his record ‘Stick Season,’” she said. “He lives in Nashville. He has boots and he’s ready to go.”

At age 19, Ballerini signed with Black River Entertainment, home then to Craig Morgan and Kellie Pickler, and made an immediate splash with her debut single, “Love Me Like You Mean It,” which went to No. 1 on the country charts.

She didn’t get any pressure from her management or record label to change her surname like so many country singers do.

“Ironically a lot of people ask me if Ballerini is a stage name and I always joke if I would, I’d do something that’s easy to spell and pronounce because it gets botched all the time,” she said. “But no one asked me to change my name, and I wouldn’t have done it anyway.”

Ballerini has scored a series of Nashville hits with attitude, including “I Hate Love Songs” and “Miss Me More.”

She can be seen these days in ads promoting her upcoming first season as a coach on NBC’s “The Voice,” saying something like “Ask me what it’s like for a woman in Nashville.” It’s never been easy for women in country music, a genre dominated by white male singers.

“It’s ever-changing,” she said. “The conversations I had about being a woman in Nashville 10 years ago, some of them are unfortunately the same as they are now, some of them are different. I focus on what I can do to impact a change in opportunities for women in country music. It starts with me making sure I have women onstage and making sure I have women as collaborators and on the crew.

“Being a coach on ‘The Voice’ [which was filmed but won’t be broadcast until starting in March], it really was such an eye-opening experience for me to see how much of a pull I do have to women artists. I am them.”

Because of the challenges of the country industry for a woman, Ballerini has branched out, doing “The Voice,” recording with the pop duo the Chainsmokers, publishing a poetry book and appearing in commercials for Pantene and Covergirl beauty products.

“I love being a country artist and I love pushing into mainstream spaces, whether it’s all-genre opportunities or doing something like ‘The Voice,’ which is all genres, or doing campaigns that are pop culture. It’s fun and a way to expand my brand and also a way to expand country.”

With her new album and all her outside activities, it’s becoming increasingly clearer that Ballerini, after all she’s been through, is learning to like herself.

“It is an ongoing evolution. To like yourself, you have to know yourself. To know yourself is truly evolving daily. And I think that knowledge has only come to me in the last couple of years. Probably just being in my 30s, especially for a woman, something happens where you shed this skin and stop looking outward for affirmation and you start looking inward for that validation. I feel like that’s happened.

“I’m pretty honest, too, on and off stage. If I’m feeling insecure or bloated or feeling myself, that comes through. I’m pretty open about it. There’s no harm in being human.”

Opening: Sasha Alex Sloan, MaRynn Taylor.

When: 7 p.m. Fri.

Where: Target Center, 600 1st Av. N., Mpls.

Tickets: $44 and up, axs.com