I did this weird thing where I stole the mailbox from my childhood home. “ She traveled this road as a child / Wide-eyed and grinning, she never tried / But now she won’t be coming back with the rest / If these are life’s lessons, she’ll take this test” - “Wide Open Spaces,” the Chicks
#COSMIC LOVE LYRICS TRIAL#
That’s taken some growing up and some trial and error, and it’s the best way I can show up honestly for women. I’ve tried to include more women in my storytelling and the process of making records. I’ve certainly had to recalibrate my brain on that because at first I was like, Oh, everyone has to be best friends! Sleepovers! Drink wine! And it doesn’t work like that.
And there’s a billion different ways to not just say “I support women” but actually do it. That’s the through-line throughout the whole thing.
“Daughters” is all about standing up for ourselves, and the way I have found to do that best is by writing the most authentically I can about the really beautiful parts of womanhood and the really difficult parts, and I think I explore that a lot on this record. “ It took a while for her to figure out she run / But when she did, she was long gone” - “Stupid Boy,” Keith Urban
The wordsmith that she is, we decided to talk through some lyrics from a few of her favorite classic country songs - and a few from Subject to Change - on how they set the album’s tone and inspired her to both look inward and cut loose. The jury’s still out on whether Ballerini will get the same kind of penguin clap awarded to male country stars who dare to add a shadow of fiddle to a radio single and are instantly pegged as the genre’s salvation, but Ballerini is on the road to her proper due as one of Nashville’s finest pop-country songwriters (and now also a published poet). I love that people probably expected something else.” And ironically, not purposefully, it’s the most sonically country record I’ve made. “I listened to a shit ton of Sheryl during this process,” Ballerini says. Ballerini went deep into that decade in quarantine: Shania Twain, Sheryl Crow, Faith Hill. “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too)” is piled high with fiddle, dobro, and mandolin, and Ballerini’s vocals ring fresh and clear thanks to tracking the whole thing live, while “You’re Drunk, Go Home” goes full-on ’90s honky-tonk kiss-off with the assistance of Carly Pearce and Kelly Clarkson. Subject to Change is also Ballerini’s most sonically rich record - and her most country. “I realized that sometimes the best hook is just the most obvious one.” This record, she says, “is much more direct: It’s how I talk to my friends when I’m two margaritas in on a Friday.” “I always thought that being a good songwriter was who could come up with the best metaphor,” Ballerini says. She reflects on that time period on a new song, “Doin’ My Best” (“2020 was a weird year,” she sings), with the kind of overwhelmed understatement we’ve all used to express the inexpressible and with direct lyrics that unroll everything that’s happened since: the marriage that turned into divorce (“Therapy for one became therapy for two”), the pop-star feature she regrets (“I woulda never asked if I knew we wouldn’t talk anymore” - likely a callout to Halsey, who featured on Kelsea cut “The Other Girl”), and some online blunders (“Twitter kicked my ass”). Noxious fumes and winged insects are nothing in comparison, after all, to the release week that preceded her previous record, Kelsea, which came out March 20, 2020, right as the country shut down (she had to do drone merch drops to fans instead of a proper release party). It’s a playful LP about insecurities, finding peace at home, and salvation through therapy from the point of view of a married woman. She’s already in the midst of a press run for her fourth album, Subject to Change (out now), but why not add more chaos to keep things exciting? “So now I’m sitting outside melting like the Wicked Witch,” Ballerini says.
#COSMIC LOVE LYRICS FULL#
When the 29-year-old country singer returned from tour rehearsal a few minutes ago, her carbon-monoxide detector was on full five-alarm blast, forcing her to run out of the house with little more than her phone and plop down in the safe, humid air - only to then have to duck a couple of aggressive hornets. It’s minor chaos in the Kelsea Ballerini household at the moment.
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