Kelsea Ballerini will not tolerate any fans shouting rude comments in the middle of her concerts.
Ballerini, 32, performed a live show in Sydney, Australia, on Friday, December 5, where she regaled audiences with a stunning acoustic rendition of “Penthouse.”
In the middle of the breakup ballad, one attendee shouted out from the crowd.
“F*** off,” Ballerini bit back, before continuing on with the song.
Kelsea Ballerini Pauses Concert, Asks Fans to Stop Dissing Ex
The Mount Pleasant artist later shared footage of the now-viral exchange via social media.
“Respectfully, if anyone yells anything disrespectful to anyone during this song again, it will no longer be on the setlist,” Ballerini wrote via her Instagram Stories on Saturday, December 6. “Please let this be a song that matters to people and not a place to insert yourself into a world that doesn’t exist and was never yours to begin with.”
She concluded, “Team everyone’s happy or bust. Please.”
Ballerini wrote “Penthouse” for her 2023 EP, Rolling Up the Welcome Mat, which detailed her divorce from Morgan Evans. (Ballerini and Evans, 40, were married from 2017 to 2022.)
“It hurts putting s*** in a box / And now we don’t talk,” Ballerini sings, detailing moving out of the then-couple’s shared Nashville apartment. “And it stings rolling up the welcome mat / Knowing you got half.”
In another part of the song, Ballerini sings about kissing “someone new last night” and seemingly moving on.
“Now I don’t know where you’re sleeping, baby,” she belts. “We got along real nice, until I wanted out, now I know you hate me.”
Ballerini later swapped the lyric “don’t know where” to “don’t care” during her live shows.
“Everything about the way that the music has connected [with people] has been really unexpected,” Ballerini exclusively told Us Weekly in August 2023, referring to the EP. “When I started singing ‘Penthouse’ live, it kind of just changed and evolved every night. One day, on a whim, I just changed one word and it took on a whole new life and they were like, ‘We need that version.’ It’s called ‘The Healed Version.’ I never made that up! That was [the fans].”
Ballerini further stressed that she had moved on from her emotionally charged divorce battle.
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“I just got to a place where the songs and what they were about — obviously, that will always be a chapter of my life that I will bookmark with that album — but I don’t have those feelings toward it anymore,” she told Us. “Now, it’s just this thing that has connected me to people and I wanna be able to say thank you by giving them what they’ve asked for through this music. So that’s why I’m so excited about it. My only feeling toward it is gratitude.”
That same year, Ballerini started dating actor Chase Stokes. After two years together, the pair called it quits last month.
A source told Us that Ballerini and Stokes’ romance had gotten “so rocky and toxic.”
“It was too much for Kelsea,” the insider said, claiming that the singer had “a lot of trust issues.”
