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It's safe to say Kelsea Ballerini loves a good easter egg - and so do we. The ‘Half of My Hometown’ hitmaker has been teasing her Rolling Up The Welcome Mat follow-up for months now, with Kelsea keeping fans updated on socials throughout its creation.
With the lead single from Kelsea Ballerini's new album dropping in June, the sleek ‘Cowboys Cry Too’ with Noah Kahan, the rollout is now picking up pace. Just yesterday (July 30), Kelsea took to TikTok to announce that she's been sprinkling one of the forthcoming song-titles into all her recent interviews and Instagram Q&As.
Naturally, the comments have been flooded with suggestions, with fans scouring all of Kelsea Ballerini's 2024 interviews for any suggestions of a potential title for her next single. As we started doing some sleuthing of our own, we didn't find the name of this song, but we may (heavy emphasis on ‘may’) have uncovered the title of the album itself. We think the project could be called The Garden.
Other fans have noticed that, over the past six months or so, there's been a recurring floral theme across Kelsea Ballerini's socials, with the Knoxville singer-songwriter regularly sharing photos of bouquets or flower prints as part of her carousels.
This has led some fans to believe the new project may be called ‘Sunflower’ specifically, a notion backed up by the fact that Kelsea teased an unreleased love-song a while back called ‘Sunflowers’. In addition, she recently shared a photo of a new tattoo of a sunflower, along with the caption, “story later for this, it will make sense”.
Despite this, Kelsea Ballerini seems to have been making a point of offering up a range of clues relating to other flowers, too, with Kelsea's outfit for the 2024 Grammys pivoting around purple flowers, while more recently, her now-iconic Met Gala dress was also adorned with a plethora of purple, orange and peach-coloured flowers. Perhaps crucially, she named her look for the latter “The Garden of Time”.
This makes us think Kelsea Ballerini is going to call her new album The Garden, rather than basing it on sunflowers specifically. When looking through Kelsea's repertoire of officially registered songs on ASCAP - which would contain songs she's planning to release - there is indeed one titled, ‘The Garden’, written by Kelsea alongside Little Big Town's Karen Fairchild and Alysa Vanderheym, two of her go-to collaborators. Based on our theory, this could well be the title-track for the project.
Of course, we might be on a wild goose chase, but The Garden certainly feels like an apt phrase to capture the healing, growth and sense of revival Kelsea Ballerini continues to reference, following her vulnerable, soul-baring Rolling Up The Welcome Mat chapter, which explored the breakdown of her marriage to Morgan Evans.
She has often described this next era of music as carrying a happier, more optimistic ambience, with Kelsea celebrating the contentment she finds in her work, her relationship and more. The project, which is confirmed for a 2024 release, is set to feature the previously teased fan-favourite, ‘To The Men Who Love Women After Heartbreak’.
The ‘Love Me Like You Mean It’ chart-topper announced the album was finished in mid-June, before taking to socials again on July 7 to reveal she'd added one more song to the tracklist. We're still waiting for a release date, but given all the tantalising clues and cryptic posts we've been getting of late, it - excitingly - looks like we won't have to wait too much longer before the record arrives in full bloom.
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