Rolling Up the Welcome Mat

Rolling Up the Welcome Mat is the second extended play (EP) by American country pop singer Kelsea Ballerini. It was released on February 14, 2023, by Black River Entertainment. Accompanied by a short film of the same name, the project was nominated for Album of the Year at the 57th Annual CMA Awards and Best Country Album at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards.

On August 1, 2023, Ballerini announced that she was releasing an extended version of the EP titled Rolling Up the Welcome Mat (For Good) on August 11, 2023.

Background
In March 2016, Ballerini began dating Australian country singer Morgan Evans, and the two were married in 2017. On August 29, 2022, Ballerini announced that she and Evans were divorcing. On November 3, 2022, it was revealed that Ballerini and Evans had reached a settlement agreement and their divorce was finalized on November 15, 2022.

On February 13, 2023, Ballerini announced through her social media that she would be releasing Rolling Up the Welcome Mat as a surprise release that night, coinciding with Valentine's Day. It was described by the singer on her social media: "'I was writing by myself for most of the project, and it was nice to trust myself again,' Ballerini writes. 'Ironically, I started writing music because my parents got divorced; that was my therapy. Rolling Up The Welcome Mat was how I processed everything. It's the way I got my feelings out of my body and heart and put them to music, which is the purest way I could've handled it.'"

Reception
Chris Willman of Variety found the choice of making an album about her divorce "unexpectedly savvy" as a "parcel all that pain into a dam-burster of a side project with no commercial expectations, no press and no holds barred". Willman wrote that even if it was a "volume of historical annotation", the songs did not "always feel so strictly autobiographical that they lack for cleverness", with "very little [that] sounds singularly country genre".

Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic described the lyrics as "a number of intimate details of their union, along with a rolling series of self-insights" not finding them, however, "intense". Erlewine wrote that the album "offers clean, uncluttered comfort" not in line with his conception in "a place of pain", as her divorce was.

The album was named the 98th best album of 2023 by Rolling Stone, prizing the "clear narrative" of the tracks, producing a "succinct post-divorce diary, leveling up her songwriting in the process on brutal confessionals".

Film
The release of the EP was accompanied by a 20-minute short film acting as a visual album for the EP, written by Ballerini and co-directed by Patrick Tracy. The film portrays a woman, played by Ballerini, going through the stages of grief and acceptance to the end of a marriage and an impending divorce.

Promotion
On March 4, 2023, Ballerini sang "Blindsided" and "Penthouse" on Saturday Night Live.

Personnel

 * Kelsea Ballerini – lead vocals, production (all tracks), background vocals (tracks 1–5)
 * Alysa Vanderheym – production, digital editing, (all tracks), programming (1–5), background vocals (1, 5), engineering (4, 6)
 * Andrew Mendelson – mastering
 * Dan Grech-Marguerat – mixing
 * Mike Stankiewicz – engineering (1–3, 5)
 * Zach Kuhlman – engineering assistance (1–3, 5)
 * Andrew Darby – mastering assistance
 * Jacob Friga – mastering assistance
 * Luke Armentrout – mastering assistance
 * Taylor Chadwick – mastering assistance
 * Charles Haydon Hicks – mixing assistance
 * Luke Burgoyne – mixing assistance