The Same As Men: Kelsea Ballerini's Mount Pleasant

Since her debut album The First Time (2015), Kelsea Ballerini has redefined country music. With hits like “Peter Pan” and “Dibs,” her songs feature powerful pop production and feminist-empowered messages that resist traditional portrayals of women waiting on Prince Charming prominent in the genre. Yet as Ballerini has grown from a flirty, confident teenager into a country superstar selling out Madison Square Garden, her songwriting has grown as well, evidenced by her 2025 EP Mount Pleasant. In response to the misogynistic scripts often featured in country music, Ballerini rewrites her narrative, devoid of patriarchal expectations and full of unbridled sincerity.

A six-track Extended Play running just under sixteen minutes, Mount Pleasant concisely details Ballerini’s struggles against misogynistic double standards following her headlining arena tour across the U.S., Canada, and Australia. The record opens with the cello plucking of “I Sit in Parks,” a beautifully haunting hook that gently frames Ballerini’s lower register. She contemplates her decisions to plan and perform her first arena tour–a rarity for women in country music–to coach on NBC’s The Voice, and to release her fifth studio album Patterns instead of marrying and having kids with her longtime partner, Outer Banks actor Chase Stokes. She ruminates, “Did I miss it? / By now is it / A lucid dream? / Is it my fault / For chasing things / A body clock / Doesn’t wait for?” At thirty-two, Ballerini appears to be preoccupied by the biological clock theory–the notion that women’s fertility largely overlaps with their career take-offs and accelerations, which forces them to choose between professional and personal success. Ballerini could have easily mentioned other struggles unrelated to motherhood that would have made this song more relatable to her younger fans who are not yet dreaming of or even considering motherhood. At the same time, she keeps the chorus vague, free of familial references, allowing her audience to have an open interpretation of what they sacrifice to follow their career goals.

Ballerini changes tone and production on the twangy, synth-based “People Pleaser.” Between electric bass hums and plucky guitar strings, Ballerini sarcastically sings, “I’ll keep being sweeter, but at my demise / Call me ‘people pleaser’ / And damn if they’re right.” Frustrated by the standard set for women to keep everyone but themselves happy, Ballerini calls out the societal expectation which demands women cater to the needs and wants of others before their own needs and wants, especially when the latter leads to others’ discomfort. Simultaneously, she acknowledges that women can never say they are being treated unfairly, that they are always giving more than they are allowed to take, for then they are labeled as selfish, whiny, and inconsiderate. As she sings in the bridge, “Right now I just wanna scream / But that would be dramatic of me.” While the song could have added additional verses describing the back-breaking work women do on a daily basis to please others, “People Pleaser” succinctly captures the enraged response of women to the expectation of consistently performing this free labor.

The denial of women to feel and to be seen as wholly human underlies the record’s most vulnerable track, “The Revisionist.” Accompanied solely by piano keys, Ballerini’s voice soars as she looks back on her life’s choices–daredeviling with her cousin on a skateboard, lying to her mother, and having sex for the first time–and laments her inability to turn back the clock. “It’s a shame you can’t erase a bad decision,” she muses, “Can’t unwrite it if it’s wrong once it’s written.” One of the most powerful and relatable human emotions is regret–wishing we could change the ending to one or all of our stories. Yet rarely are women permitted to regret the life they have lived, since that would be seen as emotional, irrational, and downright hysterical. In country music particularly, where many male singers mourn how a woman wronged them, looking back is seen as a trademark of the genre that pertains solely to men. Here Ballerini flips the script, regretting her lover in the song’s crescendoing conclusion, “Can’t rip out all the pages ‘bout you and me / It’s all in quotes / And that’s all she wrote / Now isn’t it?” Even as a songwriter known for her brutal honesty and poetic lyricism, Ballerini shatters all expectations with “The Revisionist,” making it one of her best to date.

With a presidential administration that seeks to restrict women’s full participation in society through eliminating Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs and dismantling the White House Gender Policy Council, women’s lived experiences are being ignored and subsumed by male interpretations from the top-down in our country. Yet Kelsea Ballerini has challenged and continues to challenge the perception that men’s perspectives accurately portray women’s lives, shining light on the complexity–the devastation, frustration, and regret–that make women the same as men–human.

Rating: INDY

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Kami Steffenauer is a senior in the College studying Anthropology and Women's & Gender Studies. Contrary to urban myths of rural life, she does not know how to lasso and does not own a cowgirl hat.