Review: In dazzling Charlotte show, Kelsea Ballerini even turns a hiccup into highlight
Kelsea Ballerini is getting awfully good at this whole being-a-pop-country-star-who-can-fill-an-NBA-arena thing.
Statistically speaking, for starters.
Just two songs into her first-ever headlining set at a major Charlotte venue on Thursday night, the ebullient singer — decked out in a mini-dress with ruby-red laser cut-outs, platinum boots and metallic-pink eye shadow — announced that she played to a crowd last week “that, at the time, was the biggest show on the East Coast leg of the tour.”
Then Ballerini glowed as she hit the Spectrum Center masses with her punchline: “You beat it by 30.”
The legions of her fans gathered inside the uptown venue roared back at her in approval, and although official figures related to its size weren’t immediately available, my very-rough estimate is 13,000. Or, let’s say 13,030.
But numbers aside, Ballerini staked a serious claim to top-of-the-A-list status here.
From the get-go, she wowed in delightful, delectable fashion. She delivered a remarkably self-assured performance peppered with bits of self-deprecation, self-awareness, self-help, and self-empowerment, wrapped in a production that somehow felt big and small (i.e. intimate) at the same time.
She can furiously strum an orange electric guitar in front of a literal pile of luggage and a virtual bonfire of suitcases, supported by a five-piece band and two backing vocalists — like she did early on with new song “Baggage.” But she can just as comfortably stand completely alone on a darkened catwalk playing an aching acoustic cover, as she did with 2021 duet with LANY, “I Quit Drinking,” later in the night.
She can spice things up by slinking and gyrating around a chair like a low-key exotic dancer, which she did, in silhouette, to open new song “We Broke Up.” But she also can be down for a country line dance — like the one she synced with her backup singers as plumes of pyro were blasted from the floor, during her 2020 drinking anthem “hole in the bottle.”
She can go from dazzling in that laser-cut-out minidress to killing in black skintight pants with a matching triple-bow crop top, the whole ensemble embedded with thousands of sequins that twinkle like LED lights. But she can still later out-do herself by complementing a black sequined shortie bodysuit first with a long faux fur that trailed behind her as she moved around the stage; then with a fan-made pink denim jacket featuring a University of Tennessee “T” on the front and a likeness of her Goldendoodle Dibs on the back; then, finally, with a big, black feathery-fur jacket.
Now, of course, those are all pre-determined parts of the show, well-rehearsed, stuff she does in every city.
Ballerini’s knack for doing everything with a sense of playfulness, with a smile that never seems to leave her face, and with a connection to her fans that never seems to drop out, elevates the proceedings. But what sets her apart is her gameness, her ability to go with the flow.
For instance, when the 31-year-old divorcée took a break to read one female-fan-made sign that asked, “Do you know any single guys for me?,” and gave a half-joking — or maybe more like quarter-joking — reply: “The amount of straight men that I would recommend to any girl is a dwindled amount. With peace and love and all the respect in the world,” Ballerini dead-panned, as laughter rippled through the audience. “But if I find someone, I’ll let you know.”
Or, for example, when she next singled out a preadolescent boy holding a sign indicating he was being bullied at school for liking Ballerini. “The person that’s saying the mean things is coming from a place of insecurity. They don’t know what they don’t like about themselves,” she said as she knelt on the catwalk in front of him, “and so they’re projecting down onto that. That’s a big word, I know — I’ve been in so much therapy — but it doesn’t make it fair, and it doesn’t make it right, and I’m really sorry that anyone’s ever said anything mean to you.” Then she beamed as the two took a selfie together.
Even when when the concert threatened to go awry, the singer managed to make the most of it.
Just beyond the halfway point of her hour-and-38-minute-long show on Thursday night, right before the stage went dark as the band played out the end of Ballerini’s ballad “Two Things,” a large transparent video screen positioned in the middle of the stage could be glimpsed wobbling.
Then the opening strains of her “Mountain With a View” began playing. But with the lights still low, Ballerini interrupted. “Wait, can we, like — can we stop the track? Can we stop the track?”
She added, in a sing-songy voice: “We’re hav-ing a lit-tle pro-duc-tion mo-ment.”
After a few seconds of silence and confusion, she quipped: “It wouldn’t be our biggest show if we didn’t have a little” — and for a moment she became amusingly marble-mouthed — “era. Error. Era.” So she just played along with her fumble, shouting, “ERA!”
It was still dim on stage, but the lights were brought up enough to see Ballerini in silhouette, and as techs worked swiftly to fix the, um, “era,” she offered a good-humored solution. “I can just pop out a little bit?” She proceeded to jump up and down with her left hand in the air a few times, which tickled the crowd. A few seconds after that, after getting the all-clear, she said, sweetly, “Carry on.”
And the show did — sweetly — as if nothing had ever happened.
It’s not often someone whose rise has been so meteoric can come off looking so polished in front of audiences this big, so seemingly effortlessly. But she’s been well-prepared.
Her being a new coach on the current season of NBC’s “The Voice” can’t be hurting. The role requires both a sharpening of one’s personality and the ability to think on one’s feet.
On top of that, Ballerini has had plenty of good examples to follow as she’s cut her teeth and climbed the ranks of the pop-country heap on her way to five Grammy nominations over the past decade. In Charlotte alone, she’s opened for Rascal Flatts, for Lady A, for Keith Urban, and for the Jonas Brothers.
Her most recent appearance on stage here, country fans might recall, was less than a year ago: Last April, when she was a walk-on surprise guest of Kenny Chesney’s at Bank of America Stadium, and the two teamed up to sing his “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” and their “half of my hometown.”
If Ballerini keeps this up, she might someday wind up returning to that stadium — in the lead role.
Kelsea Ballerini’s setlist
1. “Patterns”
2. “Baggage”
3. “Love Me Like You Mean It”
4. “HEARTFIRST”
5. “This Time Last Year”
6. “IF YOU GO DOWN (I’M GOIN’ DOWN TOO)“
7. “hole in the bottle”
8. “First Rodeo”
9. “Blindsided”
10. “Miss Me More”
11. “We Broke Up”
12. “Two Things”
13. “Mountain With a View”
14. “Interlude”
15. “Wait!”
16. “Cowboys Cry Too”
17. “I Quit Drinking”
18. “Beg For Your Love”
19. “Peter Pan”
20. “MUSCLE MEMORY”
21. “I Would, Would You” / “Lean on Me”
22. “How Do I Do This”
Encore:
23. “Penthouse”
This story was originally published February 21, 2025 at 10:55 AM.
