Women IN MUSIC

Start a YouTube channel. Catch fire on JazzTok. Drop a divorce EP. Defy genres. The old way of making it in music is over. As these musicians-gone-viral show, the rule breakers will reap the rewards.

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NEW COUNTRY KELSEA BALLERINI

There's a saying in the music industry: "You have your whole life to make your first record and then two days in between tour dates to make your second." As she quotes this to me, Kelsea Ballerini is on tour herself. Backstage, she's wrapped up in a gray tour hoodie, a rack of clothes and a white guitar behind her. It's Valentine's Day, and after polishing off a pink-sprinkled doughnut, she takes a break to talk to me on the anniversary of the day that changed her career.

Exactly two years before, she had released Rolling Up the Welcome Mat, a spiky six-song EP that chronicled her divorce from fellow country singer Morgan Evans in unsparing detail. For Ballerini, who grew up religious in Tennessee, the idea of divorce felt taboo, and dropping an album about it even more so. “I remember being like, ‘Oh man, I'm terrified.’ I went to sleep, and the next morning, I was like, ‘Oh, it's okay. People are finding this and connecting with this.’ But it was definitely a scary feeling.” It also marked a watershed moment for Ballerini: Between the explicitly autobiographical terrain she was mining, and the exploding market for country music in general, it introduced her to a whole new audience.

Now she has fans come to her concerts with signs reading, “Just got a divorce.” She cautions that “I try to never celebrate it until I know if it's a good thing. I don't ever want to be a poster child for divorce. It's been three years now. It’s simply not in the forefront of my life anymore.”

These days, Ballerini is in a completely different headspace. Her personal life, she says, is “unrecognizable from how it was a couple of years ago, and thank God.” She's been in a relationship with Outer Banks actor Chase Stokes for over two years. Her most recent album,