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Boston Globe

Kelsea Ballerini celebrated her fans with a Galentine's Day concert

Ballerini projects strength and vulnerability with a slight twang and a lot of sincerity, making songs like the out-of-the-muck celebration 'This Time Last Year,' the breathless doomed-relationship reckoning 'Interlude,' and the show-closing vocal showcase 'Penthouse' feel like they've been plucked straight from her journal. Her romantic love songs have an appealing realism, too, with her heart-eyed moments never veering too far into schmaltz while still retaining an air of splendor. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'It's Galentine's Day, which happens to be my love language,' Ballerini said early in the show, and her many songs celebrating long-lasting bonds that could be between lovers or friends were some of the night's most well-received. The feisty 'If You Go Down (I'm Goin' Too),' from 'Patterns,' channels its message of fealty through some murder-ballad-worthy scenarios ('Our bodies are buried and they're in the same ditch/ So even if I wanted to, I can't snitch,' she grins at one point). 'I Would, Would You,' also from that album, details the lengths she'd go to in order to support a loved one; on Thursday, Ballerini and her band underscored those promises by mashing it up with Bill Withers' 1972 devotional 'Lean On Me.' Advertisement Those songs got a boost from Ballerini clearly being grateful toward her fans; she noted that she'd played venues in Boston ranging from House of Blues to Roadrunner over the years, and midway through the show she did a spot-check of people around the room, receiving a galentine from one fan, welcoming a young attendee to her first concert with an autograph, and even posing for a from-the-stage selfie with an attendee who'd first taken a photo with Ballerini nearly ten years ago. Near the end of the show, Ballerini gave her band a break and strapped on her guitar for 'Leave Me Again,' a delicate ballad from her 2023 EP 'Rolling Up the Welcome Mat' that flips the post-breakup script: 'I hope I never leave me again,' she sings after wishing her most recent ex well, underscoring her desire to remain true to herself even as her emotions get carried away by love's flights of fancy. The voice-and-guitar arrangement and the plainspoken, yet hopeful lyrics were a gorgeously wrapped Galentine's Day gift from Ballerini to the assembled—a reminder not just of her talent, but of the strength that comes from realizing that, as she said before launching into the song, 'being able to know who you are… is enough.' KELSEA BALLERINI With Ashe, MaRynn Taylor Advertisement At TD Garden, Thursday