The way Kelsea Ballerini sees it, people expected her to do two things on her high-wire act of a latest album: “One, to go pop,” she says. “And two, to go soft.”

The pop move has been anticipated since this 31-year-old country singer and songwriter emerged about a decade ago in the wake of Taylor Swift, a foundational influence whose early embrace of Ballerini as an heir apparent left many waiting for an inevitable “1989”-style crossover moment of her own. Says Ballerini with a smile: “They can keep waiting.”

As for the assumption that she’d go “all lovey-dovey,” as the singer puts it?

“It’s because they see me happy,” she says — one result of her relationship with actor Chase Stokes, whom she began dating after the public divorce she chronicled in brutal detail on the Grammy- nominated “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat” EP released in 2023.

“But going pop and getting soft — I very intentionally did not want to do either of those things.”

What she pulls off instead on “Patterns,” out now, is a pair of difficult tricks: She writes about personal growth with a degree of emotional acuity most songwriters reserve for heartbreak, and she makes room for sonic and structural innovations within an unabashedly commercial country-music framework.

There’s “Wait!”: A psychological drama in the mind of someone “with a nasty habit of leaving before I get left.”

“That’s the last song I wrote for the album,” Ballerini says during an interview. “I felt like it was a missing part of the story, where I was the bad guy, you know? It’s easy to show the unraveling of a relationship. But then you’re like, ‘Oh, wait — part of this was my fault.’ ”

Ballerini has been in Los Angeles shooting “The Voice,” the long-running TV singing competition on which she serves as a coach in its 27th season, now airing Mondays on NBC.

In addition to “The Voice,” Ballerini guest starred on Episode 6 of “Doctor Odyssey,” the ABC cruise- ship medical drama from Ryan Murphy.

For years, acting was a “hard no,” she says. “I was terrified of failing and embarrassing myself. But the last couple years, I’ve done a lot of things that I was really scared of, and everything turned out all right.”

What links the women Ballerini admires most — “Shania, obviously, Reba, Reese Witherspoon” — is that they’re all “multifaceted,” she says. “They’re women known for doing several things, and that inspires me.”

Ballerini is a veteran star who has retained an essential down-to-earth quality but who also knows through experience how to create a sense of emotional intimacy with an interlocutor.

“Kelsea’s not a pop robot,” says Adam Levine of Maroon 5, the longtime “Voice” coach who’s working with Ballerini on the show’s current season. “Talking to her, you feel like you’re girlfriends.”

Ballerini, who calls herself “a classic oversharer,” grew up in a religious family in Knoxville, Tennessee, but moved to Nashville at age 15 to pursue music; she signed a record deal a few years later and scored a No. 1 country radio hit with her debut single, 2014’s earnest “Love Me Like You Mean It.” More chart-toppers followed — including “Dibs” and “Peter Pan,” about the danger of falling for a charming man-child — as did a Grammy nomination for best new artist.

“I sounded so young,” she says now of her early work. “For the first five years of my career, I still had such a baby face.”

With “Patterns,” Ballerini’s fifth studio LP, her ambition was to maintain “the level of honesty that I unlocked” last time while “editing myself a little bit in terms of what I share about my real life.”

For help, she assembled a team of experienced songwriters: Hillary Lindsey, Jessie Jo Dillon, Karen Fairchild (of Little Big Town) and Alysa Vanderheym, who produced “Welcome Mat” and the new album.

“They’re all amazing writers, but they’re also my friends,” Ballerini says, “so it felt comfortable to go in and just throw paint at the wall and figure it out.”

The crew held a retreat at a friend’s farm to start the creative process and came up with “Sorry Mom,” “Two Things” and “Baggage,” in which Ballerini admits, “I don’t abide by that 50-pound limit.”

The fact that the team was all women meant that “we could definitely say things we would never say in other writing rooms,” Vanderheym says. “There was wine involved, and there were some very late nights. We were just spilling our guts.”

For Ballerini, the liberation was sufficient to drop an F-bomb in one tune — hardly a given in country music. “I remember she was like, ‘Am I gonna have a little E on my record?’ ” Vanderheym says, referring to the symbol used to show that a song contains explicit lyrics. Ballerini also credits a woman not present for the retreat: “I would not have put (expletive) on this record,” she says, “had Taylor Swift not put (expletive) on a record.”

Much of “Patterns” was recorded in Vanderheym’s living room in part because the singer is no fan of a professional studio’s vocal booth. “It just feels like I’m walking into a cubicle with a Dell computer that I don’t know how to work,” she says with a laugh. “When I do vocals now, I’m crisscross applesauce on the floor with a mic in my hand.”

For the album’s lead single, “Cowboys Cry Too,” Ballerini enlisted Noah Kahan, the folk-rock singer-songwriter from Vermont, whom she met at the Grammys in February 2024. “I totally fan-girled on him, and then he asked me about ‘Peter Pan,’ ” she recalls. “I was like, ‘How do you even know that song?’ ”

In “Cowboys,” Ballerini addresses the effects of “toxic masculinity,” as she puts it, but she felt the song would be more powerful “if it’s me opening the door, and then a man actually talking about it from his perspective. So I just shot my shot and texted it to Noah.” Kahan wrote a moving verse about a guy un-learning the stoicism he inherited from his dad.

Says Ballerini: “Noah is what the song talks about, which is a man who’s not afraid to be cracked wide open and gush out.”

The singer is philosophical about “Cowboys’ ” performance after it peaked at No. 24 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart. “I’ve had seven No. 1s on country radio, and now I can’t get one anymore,” she says. “Things just change, right?”

She adds that she may never win female vocalist of the year at the Country Music Association Awards — a prize she has been nominated for seven times. “That’s probably the truth,” she says.

“But I’m in this phase of my career where there’s abundance in different ways. … I’ve had to rewire exactly what success looks like. I’m working really hard, and I’m showing up, and that matters to me,” she says. “Whatever this ends up looking like, I’m open to it.”