Young love and marriage can be difficult for anyone but it’s doubly hard when that young couple are also in the public spotlight and, sadly, most relationships like this end up in divorce. While it seemed that both Kelsea Ballerini and Morgan Evans parted on mostly amicable terms, the long distance nature of their relationship made it one doomed to fail (and one that she chronicles wasn’t as amicable as publicly lead on in “Penthouse”). Ballerini’s new six song Rolling Up The Welcome Mat EP is where she’s processed everything about the failure of her marriage.
“I wasn’t worried about anything other than presenting the songs as honestly as possible,” says the multi-platinum country songstress. “Most of them started with me and my guitar.”
Easily her most intimate work yet, Ballerini delivers a very lean, vocal forward set of songs that measures the most personal aspects of her last few years. Working with frequent collaborator Alysa Vanderheym, the pair co-produced and co-wrote three songs on Rolling Up The Welcome Mat. Ballerini wrote the other three songs on her own, committed to sorting through her life completely on her own terms.
“I was writing by myself for most of the project, and it was nice to trust myself again,” offers the woman who has come to embody the reality of growing up and into oneself for a new generation. “The only way I’ve been able to handle my life since I was 12 was to write about it. Ironically, I started writing music because my parents got divorced; that was my therapy. Rolling Up The Welcome Mat was how I processed everything. It’s the way I got my feelings out of my body and heart and put them to music, which is the purest way I could’ve handled it.”
The EP also is featured in a short film which was written and directed by Ballerini under the same name, “Rolling Up The Welcome Mat” and can be viewed below.
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