Kelsea Ballerini is giving more insight into her divorce from Morgan Evans with her Feb. 22 interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast. After opening up about the divorce on her EP, Rolling Up The Welcome Mat, Kelsea told host Alex Cooper more about what led to her decision to file the papers in August 2022. “The moment I think it was over over was I was realizing I wasn’t ready for kids,” Kelsea, who’s nine years younger than Morgan, admitted. “That’s a fundamental difference. I still don’t know if I want kids at all or not. That was something we had talked about early on and something I was changing on. He was ready. He was like, ‘I don’t want to be an old dad.’ And I’m like…I’m just not there yet. I can’t do this to save us. I can’t do that to myself.”
The country singer revealed that she went to a doctor to look into freezing her eggs without telling Morgan first. It wasn’t until afterward that she shared that with him. “I took him to dinner and I was like, ‘For my 30th birthday, I want to freeze my eggs,’ and it was not a good day,” Kelsea recalled. “I think that was when I was like…there’s a fundamental difference here that has happened and that has shifted. It was no longer just, ‘I don’t see this person, I miss this person, I’m alone and lonely.’ It was…he wants something out of life and I’m not there. Whether I’ll get there or not, I don’t think it’s with this person [if I do]. I tihnk, internally, in hindsight, that’s where I went…maybe we need to rethink this.”
However, Kelsea said that she and Morgan had been having issues for a while before that. They started couples’ therapy “a year or two” after their Dec. 2017 wedding. “[The relationship] was just feeling really lopsided,” Kelsea explained. “It was felling like this relationship wouldn’t be alive if I didn’t do everything. [Him] getting on the plane that I booked and found for [him] was not enough.”
Kelsea said that she felt like she was the only one making an effort to keep the marriage alive amidst her and Morgan’s busy schedules as touring artists. “[I got resentful] when I just simply wasn’t seeing him,” she explained. “If I wasn’t killing myself to figure out how this overlaps and how this works as I’m busy…we wouldn’t exist. He was touring, he was doing it all [too], but if you want to, you will.”
In her song “Blindsided,” Kelsea calls out Morgan for claiming to be, well, “blindsided” by the split when he was very aware of the issues they were having. She expanded on that in the interview. “There were separations, there were years of couples’ therapy,” Kelsea said. “There were many a nights of sleeping on the couch. This was a relationship that took work for a long time.”
Although Kelsea said that she was able to compartmentalize her work life and her home life, she admitted that things got so bad at one point in 2021, that she had to ask Morgan to stay home on one of the biggest nights of the year for her. “I hosted the CMT Awards and he was not there,” she recalled. “I was like…you cannot come. It was so bad. I had to work and I had to show up. We were in and out of separation and it was not good. I was like…I don’t want to fake it.”
Before Kelsea filed for divorce in August, she and Morgan were already “kind of” separated, she shared. “We were switching off in the house and I was living with my mom when I wasn’t on the road,” she explained. “Then I went on a girls’ trip to Napa with my friends and I just felt joy. I like this version of myself so much more.”
Kelsea said that her conversation with Morgan about divorcing was “beautiful.” She remembered them “crying and hugging,” and agreeing to go through the divorce “the right way,” without getting “nasty,” especially because they were in the public eye. Just a few weeks later, though, Morgan released his song “Over For You,” which alluded to his feelings of being blindsided about Kelsea’s decision to filing papers. “I was so angry,” Kelsea admitted. “I had a pretty good grasp on my grieving journey until that song came out. I was livid.”
It was the timing of the song that hurt Kelsea the most. “I felt like it was really opportunistic for him to put that out when he did. We were still going through the legalities of the divorce,” she added. “I felt really used in that moment. His healing journey is his healing journey and I respect that. But publicly exploiting it feels nasty to me before it’s final. Now, we’re months past it. We’re moving on. And I’ve taken the time to go through that grieving process and take ownership of what I brought to the table, too.”
Then, as the process continued, Kelsea got even more hurt when Morgan’s lawyers asked for him to get half of the pair’s house in the divorce. “One thing he was so die hard about in the beginning was, ‘I don’t want people to think I’m using you or riding coattails,’ and I never felt like he did,” Kelsea said. “To my core, I have to believe that this man was purely in love with me, not just artist me. But then we got divorced, and who you marry is not who you divorce. As he’s putting out a song about being blindsided, he’s taking half of the house he didn’t pay for.” Kelsea clarified that she and Morgan had a prenup, but if she didn’t give him half of the house, she would’ve had to pay alimony and deal with alimony hearings indefinitely.
Regardless of her feelings towards her ex, though, Kelsea is taking ownership of her own part in the crumbling of the marriage, too. “I don’t pin the whole downfall on him,” she revelaed. “I was not perfect, he was not perfect, it was not perfect. There were definitely moments where I look back and I’m like…I should’ve done that differently or I could’ve shown up here. In the unraveling, that’s definitely something that I ended up sharing with him. I just said, ‘I need to own the last few years. I checked out a long time ago and I need to let you know that.'”