Kelsea Ballerini is apologizing for past mistakes and getting her priorities straight on “Sorry Mom,” the new single from her upcoming album, Patterns, out Oct. 25. 

“Sorry Mom” begins with just Ballerini singing over the tender strum of a guitar, but the song soon picks up an atmospheric pop country groove. The lyrics are at once candid and clever with just the right amount of self-deprecation and sincerity, “Sorry Mom you know that I had sex/‘Fore I bought the white dress/I know you’re not impressed/With my lack of sticking to the Bible/Yeah, I got regrets, but you did your best.”

In a statement, Ballerini credited her co-writers — Alysa Vanderheym, Hillary Lindsey, Jessie Jo Dillon, and Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild — with pushing her to embrace such lyrics. “Everyone was encouraging and pushing to go further into the way we really live,” she said. “And it’s all there in ‘Sorry Mom’: chasing dreams, walking away from school, losing my virginity, walking away from college.”

She continued: “But the best part of the song is — in the fullness of time — I can appreciate how she felt about all of it, I can understand why. We can both look back on those times, knowing it was part of the journey, and it’s part of a lot of people’s journeys… But when you look at everything that happened, it turned out pretty well. To me, that’s what you can’t know ‘til you’re here.”

“Sorry Mom” follows Ballerini’s recent collaboration with Noah Kahan, “Cowboys Cry Too,” which was released back in June. The song is also set to appear on Patterns, which will mark Ballerini’s first full-length album since 2022’s Subject to Change. It also follows her hit 2023 EP, Rolling Up the Welcome Mat, which still earned a Best Country Album nomination at the 2024 Grammy Awards despite its 16-minute run-time. 

Ballerini doesn’t have any tour dates lined up yet in support of Patterns, but she does have a big TV gig on the horizon — joining the coaches panel for Season 27 of The Voice, which is set to air in spring 2025. She will be joined by Adam Levine — returning to the show for the first time since 2019 — as well as John Legend, and Michael Bublé.