Kelsea Ballerini Closes Her World Tour in Brisbane
The last time Kelsea Ballerini played the Brisbane Entertainment Centre, she was the bright-eyed opener warming up the crowd for Tim McGraw. Tonight, she walked back into the same arena as a bona fide headliner — and 11,000 fans packed the room to prove it. If this final stop on her world tour was meant to be a victory lap, Ballerini turned it into a full-throttle coronation.
Launching into “Patterns” and “Baggage,” she set the tone early: confident, fluid, and vocally razor-sharp. “Love Me Like You Mean It” arrived with the kind of roar usually reserved for artists twice her tenure, and by the time she hit “The Little Things” and “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too),” the room was locked firmly in her grip.
If there was one stumbling block, it wasn’t musical — it was literal visibility. The backdrops were bold, but the stage lighting skewed murky throughout the night, at times so dim not even the follow-spot operator could track her. Ballerini joked her way through the misfires, but you couldn’t help but wish the production design matched the calibre of the performance.
Still, nothing dimmed the emotional punch of the show’s centrepiece run: “Mountain With a View,” a full-bodied “The Revisionist,” and the heartbreaking “Beg for Your Love / Peter Pan,” delivered acoustically with the kind of stillness that hushes an arena. Ballerini’s strength has always been storytelling, and here she wielded it like a weapon.
Then she broke the spell — in the best way. Her cover of The Chainsmokers’ “This Feeling” became a communal sprint as she moved through the crowd toward a second stage, giving fans in the nosebleeds their moment. “I Sit in Parks” and “Homecoming Queen?” stripped her artistry to its bones before she turned the place feral by downing tequila from a red cowboy boot — a full “shoey” — and strutting back to the main stage like a country-pop outlaw.
The final stretch was pure catharsis: “MUSCLE MEMORY,” “I Would, Would You,” “How Do I Do This,” and the unveiling of the “Emerald City” music video. She closed with the healed version of “Penthouse,” a reclamation song that’s become an anthem of transformation.
Dimming issues aside, Ballerini delivered a triumph: a show that felt intimate inside a cavernous arena, a tour finale that doubled as a coming-of-age moment. Brisbane didn’t just welcome her back — it witnessed her arrival as an arena star.
Photos: Caroline McCredie