Kelsea Ballerini Revealed Her CMT Throwback Performance

Kelsea Ballerini revealed her CMT Throwback performance, and it's the song that started it all for the country star. She is already in Austin, Texas, getting ready to host and perform at the 2024 CMT Music Awards, which will air live on CBS on Sunday (4/7).

Kelsea is in Texas this week promoting the 2024 CMT Music Awards, which she will host and will air on Sunday (4/7).
Catherine Powell/ Getty Images 

Kelsea said what song she would perform on the show, and it was her first single. She posted a photo of the single cover from ten years ago and a clip of the song to Instagram.

She captioned the post to her four million followers, "Ten years ago, I was twenty, naive, starry-eyed, and absolutely relentless on putting my music out into the world. I'm proud to say nothing has changed…except a DECADE of this wildly beautiful journey we've gotten to share full of tours and sing-alongs, wins and losses, and growing up together."

She continued, "Soooo, before we move into new music (yes, it's coming, I swear), I wanted to celebrate the beginning with you."

"The song that started it all, Love Me Like You Mean It (reimagined and ten years later), comes out tomorrow night at midnight. Oh, and I'll be performing it on the @cmt awards on Sunday. See you there. Love you, mean it."

She closed with, "(thank you @alysavanderheym for helping me add some 2024 spice and your brilliance to this little song that could, and @reidgah for cooking up this lil teaser track)."

Ballerini recently shared her tattoos and took some time to take questions from fans on her Insta Stories, talked about her happiness, and showed off all her ink.

Wearing a gray tank top and a black camo ball cap, she showed off her tattoos. She said, "I have a tattoo. This is from a song on my first record, Square Pegs. And I have this mountain with a view. I have my hummingbird, which is my favorite tattoo. I have a wave on my hip, and that's it. Oh no, I have a little Virgo and a butterfly. They are tiny and dainty."

She added with a smile, "That's all for now, sorry mom."

In the following video slide, Kelsea talked about her happiness. She said, "Happiness is a choice. I go through days where I wake up, and I feel super overwhelmed or anxious or unsure of so much. But I think that there is really something to the power of choosing to be happy and positive choosing to be."

She continued, "Our minds and our thoughts are so powerful; choosing to find silver linings, choosing to think good thoughts is hard cause life is not linear, but yeah, I'm happy. I'm choosing to be happy, but I actually am also happy."

As Kelsea Ballerini celebrates her 30th birthday today (9/12), she is in New York City getting ready to make her MTV VMA debut performance. She is expected to treat fans to a world premiere performance from the expanded version of her EP Rolling Up The Welcome Mat (For Good).

Ballerini posted the news to Instagram. The announcement was captioned, "Boots: On Welcome Mats: Rolled OUT @kelseaballerini is making her #VMA DEBUT!! Watch her perform LIVE on Tuesday, September 12 on @mtv!"

The 2023 VMAs will air live from New Jersey's Prudential Center tonight (9/12) at 8 PM ET/PT.

Kelsea's career has really exploded in the last couple of years as she was recently nominated for the CMA's 2023 Female Vocalist of the Year among country mainstays like Miranda Lambert, Carly Pearce, Ashley McBryde, and Lainey Wilson. She is also nominated for a CMA this year for the coveted Album of the Year honor for her EP Rolling Up The Welcome Mat.

This year (2023), she enjoyed three sold-out legs of her "Heartfirst Tour," and a Grammy nomination in February for Best Country Solo Performance for "Heartfirst."

In 2021, Ballerini won two CMA Awards for her duet with Kenny Chesney, "Half My Hometown" for Musical Event and Video of the Year. Also, in 2021, She won a CMT Music Award for Performance of the Year for "The Other Girl" with Halsey.

In August, she gathered with fans and the music industry in Nashville at the Country Music Hall of Fame to celebrate the release of her extended Rolling Up The Welcome Mat EP.

Kelsea said, "Even when we were recording Rolling Up The Welcome Mat, I knew it wasn't the end of the story. We couldn't know what was to come, so [collaborator] Alysa [Vanderheym] and I left the project exactly as it was when it was written and recorded... and because of the open dialogue I have with my fans, it only felt right to finish this story before starting on the next chapter of my life."

She also directed a short film that accompanied the project.

As we join Kelsea in celebration of her birthday today, we thought we would revisit what we believe are her five funniest songs to date.

A fun song found on her debut album, "The First Time." The music video for the song is an ode to the 1990s. Ballerini is shown performing the song in a colorful bodysuit in front of a neon backdrop and a brick wall spray-painted with graffiti, with female backup dancers. When the song came out, Kelsea was touring with Rascal Flatts and headlining her own "The FirstTime Tour."

This is a song on Ballerini's "Subject To Change" album, which seemed to catapult her to a new level of fame. Kelsea wrote the song with Alysa Vanderheym and Little Big Town's Karen Fairchild in July 2021. According to Ballerini, it was the first song that she ever wrote where she did not come up with the title first; instead, the opening line, "Met him at a party / Accidentally brushed his body / On the way to get a drink at the bar" was the first lyric she wrote for the song.

The fun song she named her dog after. The official music video for "Dibs" premiered on October 22, 2015. The video consists of footage Ballerini took while on tour in York, Pennsylvania, Greenville, South Carolina, and St. Leonard, Maryland, performing in front of live crowds, celebrating her 22nd birthday, and spending time with her dog. The chorus sings, Yeah, I'm callin' dibs / On your lips / On your kiss / On your time / Boy, I'm callin' dibs / On your hand / On your heart / All mine."

Kelsea happily joins the country music ranks with a drinking song; a remix of the song featuring Shania Twain was released five months after the original single came out. The music video begins with a vintage black-and-white style with Ballerini dressed in flapper wardrobe reminiscent of the 1920s. Once the first chorus hits, colored scenes are introduced, and she is shown in a house painting a portrait of her dog Dibs in a field with a couple of friends who join her in lounging on a bed and performing a dance routine with the singer and playing chess with herself.

This song is a gem and puts Kelsea in the same company of "fun" murder songs like the Chicks' "Goodbye Earl." Ballerini said when the song came out, it was actually to evoke thoughts of the 1991 film "Thelma & Louise" and The Chicks' "Goodbye Earl." She told us then, "We really wanted to lean into a very '90s country feel, and so we brought in fiddle for the song, which I think to me makes it. That's also why there's a Chicks reference to it, which everyone picks up on, which was absolutely intentional. I didn't want to make it sound like anything else on the record. I wanted it to be its own moment."