logo
Fans Are So 'Proud' of Country Star's Long-Awaited Career Announcement

Fans Are So 'Proud' of Country Star's Long-Awaited Career Announcement

Yahooa day ago
Fans Are So 'Proud' of Country Star's Long-Awaited Career Announcement originally appeared on Parade.
just dropped some major career news that fans say they've "been hoping for for years," and they're just as excited as you'd expect.
The five-time Grammy nominee is bringing her live show across Australia later this year, sharing the news on Instagram yesterday, June 26, telling her fans, " i can't wait to hear what patterns sounds like with an aussie accent 🤍 ."
"let's have a really nice time australia!!!" she added before sharing the presale and ticketing information.
Australian fans lost their minds immediately, with countless comments emphasizing how thrilled they were with the news.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Kelsea Ballerini (@kelseaballerini)"SO SO EXCITED FOR YOU & proud that you're FINALLY making your way back over there.🥹🦘💜🩷," one commented, while another agreed, "OMG IVE BEEN WAITING SO LONG FOR THIS. Soooooo excited!!!!!"
"Been hoping for this for years," another admitted. "I can not wait now to cross all body parts and hope I can get tickets to see my absolute favorite 🩷."
"Oh how lucky are they!!!!" another fan gushed, as many others begged her to come to New Zealand, the U.K., Europe, and even other Australian locales.
"New Zealand fans are in mourning 😢," one wrote dramatically, while another tried to entice her by saying, "Queen, New Zealand NEEDS you 😢❤️."
"Girl do you ever genuinely take a break?😂," someone else asked with concern, as the "Penthouse" singer spent much of the first part of the year on tour across North America.Fans Are So 'Proud' of Country Star's Long-Awaited Career Announcement first appeared on Parade on Jun 27, 2025
This story was originally reported by Parade on Jun 27, 2025, where it first appeared.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Nielson Channels Sister's Death Into His Darkest Music Yet
Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Nielson Channels Sister's Death Into His Darkest Music Yet

Yahoo

time19 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Nielson Channels Sister's Death Into His Darkest Music Yet

Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Nielson doesn't make eye contact as he holds his phone up to his face with both hands. He is at his Palm Springs home, where he lives when he's not in Portland, Oregon, his residence since the mid-2000s after moving to the city from his native New Zealand. His setting is nondescript, which is a relief as what he is sharing about his most recent release, the six-song Curse EP, is heavy, and unexpected. It's easier to focus on the eye tattoo in the middle of his neck. Curse is Nielson's second release this year. The first was IC-02 Bogota, part of his Instrumental Cities series. Curse stands apart from that album as it is the aural representation of Nielson's emotional experience during the cancer diagnosis of his sister, who was 12 years younger than him, and her demise within two months in November 2024, as well as its aftermath. More from Spin: Sean 'Diddy' Combs Found Not Guilty On Three Most Serious Charges 'Today' Is The Day For A New Foo Fighters Song Dropkick Murphys are 'For the People' The EP holds a lot of feelings, from sadness and anger to isolation and despair. At times it is claustrophobic and at other times it is a release. Curse is the heaviest and the most horror-based Nielson has ever been. But it's also exploratory and uninhibited. It almost didn't get made as he felt it might be 'self-indulgent.' Yet the EP is what has helped him move from one stage of grief to the next, and looking back on it, he realizes he 'had no choice.' Nielson apologizes at regular intervals after bursts of what he feels is oversharing, and questions whether what he's saying makes sense. I assure him it does and that sometimes it's easier to talk to a stranger, and that with the amount of experience I have had with loss, I consider myself the death keeper, and am willing to help him hold his loss too. What inspired the EP? A lot of things on a few different levels, but the thing that mostly sent me on the path of how dark it is, is my sister passed away recently. She had a pretty hard life. She discovered that she was riddled with cancer. As soon as I found out, I got a flight back to Auckland in New Zealand, where I grew up, and where she lived. She was quite a strange person. She had so much anxiety, she needed someone around all the time. I was with her every day for a couple of months through the whole process. She was 12 years younger than me. She was my baby sister. Being around her through that process left me feeling like I could only watch horror movies and only listen to really heavy music. I wasn't able to feel good at all for a long time. It was such a horrible thing, I didn't feel inspired to work or be creative. But then I realized, I make music a lot to get past feeling depressed or feeling negative emotions. So I started making music. I was watching horror movies most days. I don't know what it is about that. Maybe it's catharsis. Surround yourself with horrible images and it kind of dulls out bad memories. How come you decided on an EP rather than an album? Originally, all that material was supposed to be the next album. I didn't know if it was good music, but I knew it was real. It comes from an honest place. I thought, 'Why don't I put out what I have now instead of completing a full album of this? If I stay here for another six months in this mindset, I don't think I'll be able to escape this stage of grief.' The more I thought about it, the more it felt like a good amount of this feeling, and a good amount of time to be here. I want to move to the next stage. Because I was doing everything by myself, I'd gone back to being insular. I didn't want to be around my bandmates. But I was thinking, 'I don't know if it's good for me if I stay here and make an entire album of this. And I don't know if an entire album of this will be good. It might go too far, and it might be too much time from beginning to end to dwell on this kind of melodramatically negative place. But if I call it quits here and call that an EP, then there's something almost fun about how spooky and creepy and dark it is.' It felt natural to cut it off here and start work on an album—which might still be music that seems related to this EP, but the difference will be that I need to start working with my bandmates and need to start spending time with people again. I don't want to use my music output to be about grieving and healing and all of that stuff. That's pretty self-indulgent. But it was just such a big event and hard time, I had no choice. As an artist, making art is your way of dealing and grieving and healing. It's definitely not self-indulgent. But you made the EP entirely by yourself? Yeah, I didn't feel like seeing anyone. It was alienating me from my dad and my mom and my family. I'd been through this intense thing, at times nightmarish, but also really intimate. What my sister and I went through, she's the only other person that knows. So going through this thing that was really intense, but then having no one to talk about it with was really strange. I didn't even think to spend time with other people. It feels like I'm in a different stage of grieving, where I can start to talk about it. I'm not even sure if I should have talked about it, but it's hard to talk about the EP without being honest. I feel like I'm in another phase now and I'm grateful that music can do that for me. If not music, I'm not quite sure what my way out of that period of time was going to be. Feeling very nihilistic and dark about everything, it's good to turn it into something I can put outside myself and feel a little bit detached from now. What 'heavy music' were you listening to? I was trying to pick things from my childhood that were dark. I had this friend—we met when we were teenagers—who died really recently. He was a real metalhead. He listened to a lot of dramatic death metal and black metal: Mayhem, Darkthrone, Nile. He also got me into a lot of Italian horror films. To me, it was always a little too much. When my sister died, I found myself listening to that stuff. And of course Sabbath, the perfect metal band. I wasn't thinking that I was making a dark album, or a sad album, or an angry album. I just thought of it as a horror movie. But I was thinking this music will be a bummer. This is not a good place to make music from, because I want to make things for people to enjoy. I want something to make people feel better, not worse. When I realized that it was a horror thing, I thought, people like horror movies and I love horror movies. Why do I enjoy it so much? The thing about horror movies that I really have always liked is they're always about our subconscious fear, what we're afraid of at the moment, or some angst we're feeling. Then the movie can be about something that is kind of on the surface, makes us feel an adrenaline rush when we jump, or can make us feel scared on a surface level. But the theme of the movie is usually something that's going on underneath. I was thinking, maybe this is how I connect to other people. We're all going through things. It's not like I'm going through this really dark period and everybody else is normal. These themes connect in ways that I don't understand, in the same way as horror movies. If I stay in that mindset, then it makes sense. Maybe it'll be music that other people will be able to get something out of. What's the draw to horror films? On the surface, watching horror movies is a horrible thing. It's an awful thing to do to yourself. But it's got something to do with catharsis. When I was a kid, I used to feel this huge relief after watching a horror movie. That thing that I was just afraid of, that's not my life. It's like waking up from a nightmare. You can feel terrible, but at the same time you feel exhilaration. That's not my life. My life is more normal than that. Earlier in the year, after getting back from New Zealand, after everything that happened, I was thinking, this is like a bad dream, but it's real. You wake up and it's like Groundhog Day. Every day sucks. And people tell you it gets easier. I don't want it to get easier. I want to feel terrible in tribute to my sister. I want to feel terrible for the rest of my life. It does get easier, but not because you get better. It's with you every day. You get used to this awful reality. You don't forget them. That's the crazy part of it. You get comfortable with this growing list of people that you miss. I think that's what the name of my band is about. When I was a kid, my grandmother died and I felt like she was following me around. As you get older, there's two people that follow you around, then three, then four, then five. I'm a middle-aged man now. It's a chorus of people, of ghosts. Nobody knows anybody else's chorus. Nobody knows what it feels like to be somebody else being followed around by all the people they lost. I feel this EP will connect in a powerful way with your fans. My instinct at first was not doing it. I'm not going to start putting my feelings down in my work. It is too painful. It is too negative to work with. I felt like it wasn't going to be translatable. There was something chintzy and tacky about trying to express myself through this EP. I felt much more nihilistic than that. But then, when I sat down and tried to do stuff, the songs on the EP, none of them are directly about my grief. They're all abstract, or they're about other things. Maybe that was the key. This is not about what happened with my sister. I just have to get this feeling out. Once I found that place, I could immediately feel that somehow this is helping. It was helping in the same way that watching horror movies and listening to death metal was helping. It's almost like it takes me out of myself a little bit. Instead of everything folding back in on itself, it was like something was coming out of me. Even if I felt like it was ugly or scary, it didn't feel unhealthy. So I just kept going. At times like that, you don't get to choose behaviors. I'm really glad I wasn't going for anger. I was worried that I might relapse, pick up some particular drug or something. I lost a few important people in my life and I had been like this before, so I was a bit worried. When I started making music, I thought, 'This is the way. This is the beginning of me starting to be normal again. Maybe it is tacky, but I'm doing it now, and it's helping, so it doesn't really matter.' I started feeling like what I'd made wasn't too private to share, because it wasn't directly about her and it wasn't directly about my experiences. It was emotionally about the place I was then. If people see the music I put out as entertainment, I didn't know if it was a good idea to talk about it. But if, like you say, people need it as much as me, if it has any use for people, that helps me too. Sometimes I think music is a bit like cooking. You cook for your friends. My wife just bought me a cleaver for a release-day gift. She's a teacher and one of the colleagues at her school makes these forges. If I made a knife and I heard that my friends are using it, I'd be like, 'Oh, that's cool. That's so awesome that it has a life after I made it.' Music can be like that too. Feeling the stuff you make creates something positive in the world is a good thing to feel about your job. Feeling useful is a good feeling. And I feel good about moving on to whatever next music I'm going to make. To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.

🎥 Kepa offers Arsenal fans some revealing insights after signing
🎥 Kepa offers Arsenal fans some revealing insights after signing

Yahoo

timean hour ago

  • Yahoo

🎥 Kepa offers Arsenal fans some revealing insights after signing

Kepa Arrizabalaga became Arsenal's first signing of the summer on Tuesday and the hard work began almost immediately for the goalkeeper. Shortly after sealing the move from London rivals Chelsea, the Spain international was tasked with fielding some quickfire questions about his new employers. Advertisement It's fair to say his answers were quite revealing, not least who he picked as his favourite Gunners' player. You can see the full Q&A below. Did any of Kepa's responses surprise you? Let us know in the comments! 📸 Dan Istitene - 2025 Getty Images

Meg Donnelly And Milo Manheim Talk ‘Zombies 4' And Beyond
Meg Donnelly And Milo Manheim Talk ‘Zombies 4' And Beyond

Forbes

timean hour ago

  • Forbes

Meg Donnelly And Milo Manheim Talk ‘Zombies 4' And Beyond

ZOMBIES 4: DAWN OF THE VAMPIRES - (Disney/Matt Klitscher) MILO MANHEIM, MEG DONNELLY In the earlier Zombies installments, fans of the hit Disney franchise got to behold zombies, werewolves, and aliens in all their spooky, sci-fi glory paired with incomparable music and dance numbers. Incorporating vampires and their rivals, the "Daywalkers", into the mix for Zombies 4: Dawn of the Vampires felt like a natural progression. The fourth film, which premieres July 10 on the Disney Channel and the next day on Disney+, welcomes in singer and actress Freya Skye as the Daywalker 'Nova' and Villains of Valley View star Malachi Barton as 'Victor' the vampire. The pair gave memorable performances as their characters found themselves in a Romeo and Juliet tale with a vampire twist. According to the young actors, they were able to establish chemistry before arriving on set in New Zealand to shoot the movie. 'We had group FaceTimes and stuff like that before we started and I feel like the connection literally started from the beginning,' Barton said. "It was from this room that we're in right now is when I first met Freya and where we first met each other and I knew she was Nova and I hope she knew I was Victor, but we started a connection on FaceTime. I remember DMing Freya. Did I DM you? 'No, yeah, I DMed Freya and then I DMed MK (Mekonnen Knife) and all the whole other cast. And I was like, 'Hey guys, we're making a movie together.' And then we made a group chat, you know, started the connection. And then it felt like we were already best friends by the time we got to New Zealand.' 'I mean there wasn't a ton of time, I guess, in between kind of finding out we were all doing the movie together and being on set," Skye recalled. "So I feel like we're really lucky that it all just came so naturally. And I feel like we very naturally built a friendship and built that chemistry, which resonated on screen too. So yeah, it all came really naturally.' As the franchise's storyline progresses in part 4, Zombies stars Meg Donnelly and Milo Manheim, whose powerhouse performances as 'Addison' and 'Zed' made them the undeniable heart and soul of the franchise in the first three movies, take on a secondary role in the fourth installment. Meg Donnelly, Malachi Barton, Freya Skye, Milo Manheim at the Disney 2025 Upfront Red Carpet held at ... More North Javits Center on May 13, 2025 in New York, New York. (Photo by Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty Images) Donnelly and Manheim served as executive producers for the first time on Dawn of the Vampires. It seems their involvement with the franchise moving forward may be more behind the camera, making decisions that serve the fans and the young onscreen performers. 'I don't really know how I'm thinking about it other than we're welcoming this new family in, and they're definitely taking on a role that we have been in for the whole Zombies franchise,' Manheim said after I asked if this would be it for him and Donnelly with the franchise. "But, you know, I know we're definitely going to be involved with further Zombies movies, at least behind the camera. 'We'll see if it makes sense for the story, for us to be back or not. But I could not be happier that we're passing the torch to this group of kids. "They're incredible and they embody everything Zombies stands for. So I wish I could give you a more concrete answer, but the answer is the universe will let us know.' Meg echoed Milo's thoughts on the duo's Zombies future. 'I think if, hopefully, and when there's another Zombies movie, I think, regardless of if we're in it or not, I think executive producing this time around was so fulfilling. And I would love to even step into that more on the next one, if they would have us,' she added. 'So I think that really excites me about (the future) is being even more involved than we were. And we were super involved in Zombies 4. But yeah, I think kind of the same thing. Let the universe decide.' 'We spent so much time just with the producers on Zombies 4, the only time we weren't with them was when we were in costume and character shooting these things," Manheim said. "But I think if we were to do another one and be less a part of it in front of the camera, we would just be able to have more time figuring out universe building, world building, if you will.' Being co-producers on Zombies 3 opened the two actors up to a new level of involvement and input on a project. 'I think we actually had so much say and our changes really made it in the movie, which was really cool,' Donnelly stated. 'And then now being executive producers, I feel like we were now involved in the casting decision and the wardrobe and some of the dance numbers, like how they're filmed and even like order of scene filming. "We really got to be involved even more so and so it was really an honor because we've been with this (franchise) for almost 10 years now and I think just being able to be behind the scenes like we always are talking about creative ideas, but to actually do them was just really cool. And it's a very unique position that is very rare. So I'm really grateful that we are one of the rarities in that sense.' A decade ago, Meg and Milo were just two hopefuls among a plethora of young performers hoping to get a shot at starring in a new Disney project. 'Our audition process was wild,' Donnelly recalled. "We had a lot of individual auditions where we just auditioned alone. And then we had chemistry reads where there was a bunch of boys going out for Zed, a bunch of girls going out for Addison, and we were all mix matching and reading the scenes, and even singing together. LOS ANGELES, CA - FEBRUARY 25: Actors Meg Donnelly (L) and Milo Manheim attend a soundtrack ... More signing for Disney Channel's "Zombies" at Barnes & Noble at The Grove on February 25, 2018 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by) "And they just do that to find who has the best chemistry, what looks the best on screen. We weren't actually paired up with each other at first. But we were talking a lot, even though we should have been talking to the other people we were paired up with. And we ended up reading together and it kind of worked from there. And we did an impromptu duet to Love Is an Open Door (from Frozen)." 'We did, they wanted us to sing together. So we were like, give us like five minutes. And then we went outside and we figured out Love is an Open Door and then we went in there,' Manheim remembered. After the gauntlet of an audition for the first film, Meg and Milo have become household names for their young fans. They've also succeeding in inspiring upcoming generations of performers. So what advice do they have? 'I would say, I mean, it sounds kind of cliche, but just bear with me. Do the things that you love to do. I mean, this goes within our industry and outside of it,' Manheim said. 'I think it's very easy for us to try to do the things that we feel are expected of us. You know, like your family does this thing, so you should do that thing, too. I think really find what you love, what excites you and then you'll be a lot better at that thing because you'll be super interested in it. You're very passionate about it, so you take that extra step to learn a little bit about it. So I'd say just seriously follow your passion follow anything that excites you.' 'And stay in theater!' Donnelly added.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store