Entertainment
Kelsea Ballerini can't stop telling the truth
The way Kelsea Ballerini sees it, people expected her to do two things on her high-wire act of a new album: “One, to go pop,” she says. “And two, to go soft.”
The pop move has been anticipated since this 31-year-old country singer and songwriter emerged about a decade ago in the wake of Taylor Swift, a foundational influence whose early embrace of Ballerini as an heir apparent left many waiting for an inevitable “1989”-style crossover moment of her own.
Says Ballerini with a smile: “They can keep waiting.”
As for the assumption that she’d go “all lovey-dovey,” as the singer puts it? “It’s because they see me happy,” she says — one result of her relationship with the actor Chase Stokes, whom she began dating after the public divorce she chronicled in brutal detail on last year’s Grammy-nominated “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat” EP.
“But going pop and getting soft — I very intentionally did not want to do either of those things.”
What she pulls off instead on “Patterns,” which came out Friday, is a pair of difficult tricks: She writes about personal growth with a degree of emotional acuity most songwriters reserve for heartbreak and she makes room for sonic and structural innovations within an unabashedly commercial country-music framework.
Take “First Rodeo,” a sleek midtempo track with twangy guitars and blipping synths in which Ballerini extends a metaphor about getting back on the horse further than you’d think possible without breaking it. Or take “Sorry Mom,” an almost uncomfortably forthright note to her mother about the let’s-call-it-scenic route Ballerini took to becoming “a woman that you’re proud of.” (“Showing up again on Sunday morning / You just made the eggs and turned your head,” she sings, which — oof.)
Then there’s “Wait!”: three minutes of psychological drama in the mind of someone “with a nasty habit leaving before I get left.”
“That’s the last song I wrote for the album,” Ballerini says on a recent morning in a sunny West Hollywood hotel suite. Wrapped in a cozy gray cardigan, she’s sitting cross-legged on a sofa, shoes off, with an overstuffed pillow in her lap. “I felt like it was a missing part of the story, where I was the bad guy, you know? It’s easy to show the unraveling of a relationship. But then you’re like, ‘Oh, wait — part of this was my fault.’”
Ballerini has been in Los Angeles for a few months shooting “The Voice,” the long-running TV singing competition on which she’ll serve as a coach when the show’s next season premieres in February. She used to hate L.A., she says, but given the time she knew she’d be spending here, she resolved to try to make the city feel more like home by renting a place in Los Feliz, which reminds her of her Green Hills neighborhood back in Nashville; she filled the house with the same candles she burns at home and she cooks dinner as many nights as she can. She brought her dog Dibs too, only to discover after getting here that the 9-year-old pup has cancer.
“I just dropped him off for chemo on the way here,” she says, scrolling through the many photos of Dibs on her phone to find one to show off. “It’s gutting, but he’s in good spirits. If I was out here, and this was happening in Nashville, I’d feel so displaced.”
In addition to “The Voice,” Ballerini recently shot a guest-star spot on “Doctor Odyssey,” the new cruise-ship medical drama from producer Ryan Murphy. For years, acting was a “hard no,” she says. “I was terrified of failing and embarrassing myself. But the last couple years, I’ve done a lot of things that I was really scared of, and everything turned out all right.” What links the women Ballerini admires most — “Shania, obviously, Reba, Reese Witherspoon” — is that they’re all “multifaceted,” she says. “They’re women known for doing several things, and that inspires me.”
Even so, “Patterns” showcases the deepening of Ballerini’s core talents as both a singer and a songwriter. In “Two Things,” she finds the ragged edge of her honeyed voice to put across the exasperation involved in a love-hate relationship; in “We Broke Up,” she realizes that closure is available only to those who are ready for it: “I could take a deep dive in the details / I could hide, I could cry till I throw up / Take a stroll, camera roll, old emails / But it’s as simple as, ‘We broke up.’”
After years of screwed-tight Nashville songcraft, Ballerini achieved a more conversational aspect on “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat” that carries through to the new album. (Among her touchstones was SZA’s wonderfully digressive “SOS.”) “I used to think the only great songwriters were the cleverest ones — the Shane McAnallys,” she says, referring to the prolific country hitmaker she describes as “a god” at turning a phrase just so. “But I let that go during ‘Welcome Mat’ — I didn’t even care if things rhymed — and that gave me so much more of a canvas to work with.” Now, she says, a song’s success is less about its hookiness or wordplay than about “whether you go, ‘Oh my God, I literally texted that to my friend yesterday.’”
Kelsea Ballerini will serve as a coach on the next season of “The Voice.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
In person, Ballerini is warm, chatty, slightly gossipy — a veteran star who has retained an essential down-to-earth quality but who also knows through experience how to create a sense of emotional intimacy with an interlocutor.
“Kelsea’s not a pop robot,” says Adam Levine of Maroon 5, the longtime “Voice” coach who’s working with Ballerini on the show’s upcoming season. “Talking to her, you feel like you’re girlfriends.”
Ballerini, who calls herself “a classic oversharer,” grew up in a religious family in Knoxville, Tenn., but moved to Nashville at 15 to pursue music; she signed a record deal a few years later and scored a No. 1 country-radio hit with her debut single, 2014’s earnest “Love Me Like You Mean It.” More chart-toppers followed — including “Dibs,” whose title provided her dog’s name, and “Peter Pan,” about the danger of falling for a charming man-child — as did a Grammy nomination for best new artist.
“I sounded so young,” she says now of her early work. “For the first five years of my career, I still had such a baby face.”
In 2017, when she was 24, Ballerini married Morgan Evans, an Australian country singer she’d met when the two co-hosted an awards show in Brisbane. Her career continued to grow after the wedding — she tried out new sounds with the Chainsmokers and Halsey and cut successful country duets with Shania Twain and Kenny Chesney — yet her relationship with Evans eventually withered.
On “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” which came out just a few months after the couple finalized their divorce in late 2022, Ballerini sings that they “had to get drunk to ever really talk”; in one song she recounts a breakfast by herself in Big Sur while her husband was on tour in Europe: “The pictures look pretty,” she sings, “at least they do on your Instagram.” (Evans offered his side of the story in his plaintive 2022 single “Over for You,” in which he sings, “It kills me to know you were drifting alone” and wonders, “Was it something I was missing, or is there someone else?”)
“I’m so f—ing proud of the songwriting on ‘Welcome Mat,’” Ballerini says of the EP, which came out amid a wave of divorce albums by female country stars, including Kacey Musgraves and Carly Pearce. “I feel like I proved to myself my credibility — not just to myself, but especially to myself.” Yet she also realizes that her candor — in her music as well as in a very dishy episode of the popular “Call Her Daddy” podcast — came “at the expense of a lot of things,” she says. Meaning? “I hurt some people.”
Ballerini describes herself as “a classic oversharer.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
With “Patterns,” Ballerini’s fifth studio LP, her ambition was to maintain “the level of honesty that I unlocked” last time while “editing myself a little bit in terms of what I share about my real life.” For help she assembled a team of experienced songwriters: Hillary Lindsey, Jessie Jo Dillon, Karen Fairchild (of Little Big Town) and Alysa Vanderheym, who produced “Welcome Mat” and went on to produce the new album.
“They’re all amazing writers, but they’re also my friends,” Ballerini says, “so it felt comfortable to go in and just throw paint at the wall and figure it out.” The crew held a retreat at a friend’s farm to start the creative process and came up with “Sorry Mom,” “Two Things” and “Baggage,” in which Ballerini admits, “I don’t abide by that 50-pound limit.”
The fact that the team was all women meant that “we could definitely say things we would never say in other writing rooms,” Vanderheym says. “There was wine involved, and there were some very late nights. We were just spilling our guts.” For Ballerini, the liberation was sufficient to drop an F-bomb in one tune — hardly a given in country music. “I remember she was like, ‘Am I gonna have a little E on my record?’” Vanderheym says, referring to the symbol used by streaming services to show that a song contains explicit lyrics. (Ballerini also credits a woman not present for the retreat: “I would not have put ‘f—’ on this record,” she says, “had Taylor Swift not put ‘f—’ on a record.”)
The singer and Vanderheym recorded much of “Patterns” in Vanderheym’s living room in part because the singer is no fan of a professional studio’s vocal booth. “It just feels like I’m walking into a cubicle with a Dell computer that I don’t know how to work,” she says with a laugh. “When I do vocals now, I’m crisscross applesauce on the floor with a mic in my hand.”
For the album’s lead single, “Cowboys Cry Too,” Ballerini enlisted Noah Kahan, the folk-rock singer-songwriter from Vermont, whom she met at the Grammys in February. “I totally fan-girled on him, and then he asked me about ‘Peter Pan,’” she recalls. “I was like, ‘How do you even know that song?’” In “Cowboys,” Ballerini addresses the effects of “toxic masculinity,” as she puts it, but she felt the song would be more powerful “if it’s me opening the door and then a man actually talking about it from his perspective. So I just shot my shot and texted it to Noah.” Kahan wrote a moving verse about a guy un-learning the stoicism he inherited from his dad.
Says Ballerini: “Noah is what the song talks about, which is a man who’s not afraid to be cracked wide open and gush out.”
According to Ballerini, “Cowboys Cry Too” is “one of the two most country-radio-friendly songs I’ve ever put out.” (The other one is “If You Go Down [I’m Goin’ Down Too],” a cut from 2022’s “Subject to Change” LP that Ballerini co-wrote with McAnally.) Yet four months after it was released, “Cowboys” is stuck down in the high 30s on Mediabase’s closely watched country chart.
The singer is philosophical about “Cowboys’” performance. “I’ve had seven No. 1s on country radio, and now I can’t get one anymore,” she says. “Things just change, right?” She adds that she may never win female vocalist of the year at the Country Music Assn. Awards — a prize she’s been nominated for seven times, including at next month’s CMAs ceremony. “That’s probably the truth,” she says.
“But I’m in this phase of my career where there’s abundance in different ways,” not least the TV gigs and the concert she has booked Tuesday night at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where she plans to perform “Patterns” from beginning to end. “I’ve had to rewire exactly what success looks like. I’m working really hard, and I’m showing up, and that matters to me,” she says. “Whatever this ends up looking like, I’m open to it.”
Timothée Chalamet has been acting a bit strangely lately. It started last year, when he won the SAG Award for A Complete Unknown and said in his acceptance speech that he wasn’t just aiming to be good, but wanted to be one of the all-time greats. This behavior continued during his press tour for Josh Safdie’s ping pong odyssey, Marty Supreme. “I’m doing top-level shit,” he said during one interview. “It’s been seven, eight years I’ve been handing in top-of-the-line performances.”
There is something off-putting about this level of bravado and ambition especially when it’s applied to an art form which isn’t—or at least shouldn’t be—about scoring wins and besting your competition. On the other hand, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it was kind of refreshing, too. False humility is as bad—hell, it’s worse—than Chalamet’s WWE-style boasting. The actors who pretend to rise above it all, the ones who say, “Oh gosh, I didn’t even realize I got an Oscar nomination; I was in my garden when I got the call from my manager”—truly work my nerves. (Girl, please. You were glued to your TV surrounded by your publicist, your dietician, and your glam squad.)
That said, at some point, I began to wonder if what Chalamet was doing was merely schtick. He’s proven himself to be an incredible self-promoter—remember when he turned up to the Timothée Chalamet Look-a-Like Contest? (He lost.) Could all of this bragging and grandstanding be some sort of meta promotion for the film? Might he be the first actor to take The Method all the way through the press tour?
I think the answer is yes and no—which is possibly what makes Chalamet the perfect actor to depict Josh Safdie’s patented brand of manic New York city hustler.
In a way, Chalamet has always been this nervy, hopped up kid from Manhattan. He’s street smart, like all New York kids (yes, even the privileged ones) and he absorbed a lot of New York hustle culture, which is all about perpetual motion and grandstanding and faking it till you make it.
This is Josh Safdie’s first film made separately from his brother, Benny (who made some waves of his own this year with the more conventional sports biopic, The Smashing Machine) but it feels exactly like the brothers’ early work, Good Time and Uncut Gems.
Those films were about strivers and con artists who were also kind of losers. In my capsule review of Uncut Gems, in which Adam Sandler plays a diamond broker who is addicted to gambling, I said: “It’s honestly a nightmare—a nervous breakdown of a movie that never allows you to catch your breath….The Safdie brothers film [Sandler] like a shark that needs to keep moving to survive.”
I honestly could have cut and pasted that review for Marty Supreme, but there are a couple of key differences. For one, it takes place in post-war Manhattan, beautifully and painstakingly recreated by master production designer Jack Fisk. And Marty Mauser (loosely based on real ping-pong legend, Marty Reisman) actually is talented. He is one of the best ping pong players in the world, if not the very best, as he’ll tell anyone within earshot.
When the film starts, he’s peddling loafers and pumps at his uncle’s shoe store. Of course, he’s a good sales person, too—he knows how to lay on the charm. His uncle just wants to promote Marty to manager and be done with it, but Marty explains that he’s only working there to raise money to compete in the upcoming British Open. Marty’s mother (Fran Drescher) also wants him to stop pursuing this ridiculous table tennis dream and settle down like a normal Jewish son. She keeps faking a debilitating illness over the phone in an attempt to get him to come home from whatever tournament he’s playing in. (You can’t con a conman—he never buys it.)
Marty has a girlfriend, of sorts, named Rachel (Odessa A’zion), who is married to a dullard named Ira (Emory Cohen). In the first scene, she and Marty have a quickie in the supply closet and she gets pregnant—a detail that will animate much of the film.
Marty never has enough money to get where he wants, he’s always scheming and stealing and hustling—but he’s monomaniacal. It’s all about ping pong. Even sex and love are secondary to the game he’s obsessed with. (When Rachel tells him she’s pregnant he makes it clear he wants no part of raising a kid.)
I never thought I’d be writing this phrase, but I wish the film had even more ping-pong scenes. Whether he’s at a tournament or hustling some backroom players in a bowling alley with his buddy Wally (Tyler the Creator)—it’s a joy to watch Marty play. Ping-pong players are marvels of speed, hand-eye coordination, and leaping ability and when Marty’s on his game, it’s electrifying. (After months of rigorous training, Chalamet performed all the table tennis scenes himself, without a body double. Top level shit, you might say.) Marty is obnoxious, of course, when he plays—shouting, cursing, crowing—but he’s gracious when he wins, which is most of the time, wrapping his opponent in a bear hug. However, at the London Open, he finally meets his match, a steely-eyed Japanese player named Koto Endo (Koto Kowaguchi) who surprises Marty with his thickly foamed paddle and lightning fast reflexes. (Unsurprisingly, Marty is also a menace when he loses, cursing at the refs and falsely calling out Endo for cheating.)
While in London, staying at a fancy hotel he can’t afford (he charged it to the International Tennis Table Federation, against their express objections), he lays eyes on aging movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) who’s in town to do a play, and decides to pursue her, just because. He does so with the same dogged determination and unearned confidence with which he does everything else. Somehow it works and they become lovers.
Kay is married to a wealthy businessman named Milton Rockwell, played by Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame. (I confess I spent the entire film trying to figure out what movies I’d seen this excellent actor in before—was he in The Irishman? A season of The White Lotus? It was a bit of a head slapper when I finally googled him.) Rockwell offers to sponsor Marty but he’s the kind of man who likes to lord his wealth and privilege over the little guy—and he’s a sadist, as he proves in one particularly memorable scene.
One of the other major plot points involves a gangster’s German Shepherd that Marty has somehow managed to lose—and it’s not clear who will kill Marty first, the dog, the dog’s new gun-toting farmer owner (Penn Jillette, in an amusing cameo), or the gangster himself.
Some have argued that Marty is an asshole and that his quasi-redemption at the end of the film is unearned, but I don’t see it that way. I think Marty is part asshole, part mensch (classic example: He steals a chunk of an Egyptian pyramid…to give to his mother as a gift). His Jewish family, still traumatized by the Holocaust, has lots of love and lots of tsuris—just like Marty himself. Note how Marty always offers a sincere “I love you,” as he rushes out of any room.
In case I wasn’t clear above, Chalamet is fantastic in this role. It may very well be his best work yet, in a career filled with excellent performances. You could make the case that Safdie’s film allowed him to evolve into his purest form—the antsy, quicksilver street hustler who was in there all along.
“I feel like the gift of my life is to focus on this acting thing the way Marty Mauser is locked in on ping pong,” he recently told Vanity Fair.
Mission accomplished, Timothée. Mission accomplished.
Perry Bamonte, guitarist and keyboardist for the Cure, has died. He was 65.
The band announced on its website on Dec. 26 that Bamonte died “after a short illness at home over Christmas.”
“Quiet, intense, intuitive constant and hugely creative, ‘Teddy’ was a warm hearted and vital part of the Cure story,” the band said.
The London-born Bamonte began touring with the Cure as a guitar tech and assistant in 1984, then joined the band full-time in 1990. He performed over 400 shows with the group and recorded on the albums “Wish,” “Wild Mood Swings,” “Bloodflowers,” “Acoustic Hits” and “The Cure.”
Bamonte parted ways with the Cure after 14 years, later performing with the group Love Amongst Ruin. He returned to the Cure in 2022 for “another 90 shows, some of the best in the band’s history,” the group said, including the Nov. 1, 2024, London show documented on the concert film “The Show of a Lost World.”
As a member of the Cure, Bamonte was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. The band is still scheduled for a run of European festivals and headline shows in 2026.
“Our thoughts and condolences are with all his family,” the group said. “He will be missed.”
The Housemaid, 2025.
Directed by Paul Feig.
Starring Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried, Brandon Sklenar, Michele Morrone, Ellen Tamaki, Megan Ferguson, Brian D. Cohen, Indiana Elle, Amanda Joy Erickson, Don DiPetta, Alexandra Seal, Sophia Bunnell, Lamar Baucom-Slaughter and Arabella Olivia Clark.
SYNOPSIS:
A struggling woman is happy to start over as a housemaid for an affluent, elite couple.
Whether or not one has read the recently published book by Freida McFadden, there is no question where director Paul Feig’s The Housemaid (adapted from Rebecca Sonnenshine’s screenplay) is headed. He is, first and foremost, a feminist filmmaker (absolutely not a bad thing), and there are certain predictable but vital modern-day storytelling trends. That’s not a fault here, but it is damn near maddening how long the film wears a mask before arriving at that turning point. Even while acknowledging quite a few clever bits of foreshadowing with a dash of welcome class commentary and themes surrounding gossip and how much of it should be taken credibly, the first half of this narrative doesn’t need to go on for roughly an hour with failed attempts at misdirection.
That the second half of The Housemaid, which lays out the details behind the obvious and fully embraces its trashiness with a sprinkling of truly sinister behavior, is as intense as it is, only makes the shortcomings more frustrating. When the specific “whys” of what is happening here are given to the audience, all that’s left is white-knuckle suspense that could go in multiple directions, with either an optimistic or tragic climax. For whatever reason, the journey to that turn is sometimes a slog – generally only salvaged by its trio of outstanding performances leaning into the campiness – that seemingly assumes its audience has never read a trashy paperback airport novel or seen a thriller.
Despite the predictability of some elements, one still doesn’t want to dive too deeply into the synopsis. Nevertheless, it involves Sydney Sweeney’s Millie, a woman on parole for an undisclosed crime desperately seeking employment to stay on the outside, even if it means telling white lies to hopefully get hired as a live-in housemaid. A meeting for such a position with Amanda Seyfried’s Nina goes as well as she could hope for. Still, in the back of her mind, she believes the resume will be scanned for its dishonesty, costing her the job opportunity.
It goes without saying that Millie gets the job and begins working for Nina, given an attic for a bedroom (which suspiciously has a deadbolt on the door and a window that no longer opens), and basic housework duties such as cleaning, cooking, and looking after the rude young daughter Cecelia (Indiana Elle), who has clearly gotten a bit too comfortable with such a privileged life. Now, there have been some traumatizing hardships as more is gradually revealed about Nina’s past and some actions as a mother. Nina also shows signs of schizophrenia immediately after giving Millie the position, repeatedly and frequently scolding her for doing what was asked, while insisting that she never requested that.
Fortunately, Nina’s husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar, taking a page out of the Glen Powell charming playbook, but with sides to the performance the latter would struggle to pull off) witnesses much of the crashouts and mistreatment toward Millie for no justifiable reason, offering some support, peace, and stability. Unsurprisingly, Millie still wants to find another job and get the hell out of there.
As mentioned, Millie is also played by Sydney Sweeney. Hence, it makes sense that Nina, who is already spiraling and paranoid, would warn her not to make any passes or advances towards Andrew. That’s also where the film starts to fall apart in terms of logic, as no one in their right mind would hire this particular woman to be a housemaid if that insecurity or fear for potential adultery were there, especially after the background check on the resume raises several red flags. Nina’s behavior is also so erratic, temperamental, and hostile that one wonders why someone like Andrew is typically calm, still around, and always so quick to forgive her and downplay the severity of it all.
A lot is happening here regarding the character dynamics that doesn’t make any sense, which is also part of the point since we know there are ulterior motives at play. To sit with such illogical behavior for roughly an hour, while also knowing where this is ultimately going, is downright annoying. The viewer is in a constant state of knowing what’s up while ticked off, waiting for the specifics to come into play and the genre to shift for far too long. Then, The Housemaid starts doing what it should have done a while ago, becoming a genuine thrill ride in the process. It’s a film that admittedly does fire on all cylinders once the puzzle pieces fall into place.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder
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