Kelsea Ballerini recently stopped by The Bobby Bones Show, where she played hits including “Love Me Like You Mean It” and “I Hate Love Songs,” and also chatted about her home life, her approach to social media, and her recent collaboration with country music icon Shania Twain.
The “hole in the bottle” singer and her husband, fellow artist Morgan Evans, recently moved from an apartment to a house with their dog, Dibs. She says the larger space has been a wonderful change, especially for Dibs.
“I didn’t realize how much poor little puppy anxiety he has. He hates dogs, because he got attacked at a dog park when he was a little puppy, so all the dogs in the hallway to get down to the ground floor [of the apartment] where he could use the bathroom, it was just…he was anxious all the time, and I felt so bad. So he’s a happy boy now,” she told Bobby Bones.
Ballerini is known for being transparent with her fans on social media, sharing music and moments from her life. Even so, that willingness to be open on social media can bring backlash in addition to good will, so Ballerini opted to disable the comments section on her Instagram.
When asked about the decision, she said, “I’m super sensitive and I think that’s a good thing. I think for a long time, I was reading all the comments, and obviously I loved the good ones, but I would find the bad ones and they would just hurt my feelings. I didn’t want to get to a point where I wasn’t posting and sharing my life, because I like being that person that’s an oversharer. I think it’s relatable and girls need to see that and so, I was like, ‘It’s either me not sharing, or me sharing and not caring about what people say,’ so I just turned [comments] off for awhile.”
Ballerini has earned tons of praise on social media for her revamped version of “hole in the bottle,” featuring Twain. She told Bones how the video for “hole in the bottle” inspired the collaboration.
“Early in quarantine, [Shania] emailed me like, ‘Hey, I’m working on a project. I want to do something together, let’s send stuff back and forth until we find something.’ So for like three or four months, she would send me a chorus, or I would send her a chorus that I wrote, and we would be like, ‘That’s not quite it,’ like let’s keep digging until we find something.” she explained. “It wasn’t until we shot the video for ’hole in the bottle’— a lot of the outfits I tried to kind of tip my hat to Shania like her ‘Man, I Feel Like A Woman’ and all that kind of stuff. So I watched the video back and I was like, ‘Wait a second, this song, it’s her vibe anyway. I emailed her and I was like, ‘What about this? It’s already out and I tribute you in the video. Are you down?’ And she was like, ‘Yeah.’
“And we’ve had lots of wine together, Shania and I, so it made sense,” she laughed.
