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Kelsea Ballerini on Hosting the CMT Music Awards One Final Time, and Balancing ‘Goofy’ and Serious Sides: ‘Two Things Can Live in the Same Space’
Kelsea Ballerini will be hosting the CMT Music Awards for a fourth and final time. She discusses previous show highlights and what's in store for her.
The host finds herself now in that hopefully sweet spot where she’s looked up to as a veteran by some of the youngest female artists coming up, but is still a veritable kid to much of the industry that’s kept her as a star for 10 years — a middle ground she’s happy to inhabit right now, however hard it is to fully realize from the inside out. I feel like I’ve spent a lot of my career kind of with my shoulders a little bit hunched in, and I’m really trying to stand tall in this last decade of work and be proud of myself and show up for that, while also knowing that I still have a long way to go and I always wanna push myself and keep growing. If anyone following the country world had failed to give her credit as a cred artist in the past, “Welcome Mat” disabused them of those doubts, and racked up the kind of album of the year nominations at awards shows (including the Grammys) that had sometimes eluded her when she was producing more effusive material.
Or read this on Variety
