Is Kelsea Ballerini jumping in ‘Heartfirst’ with someone new?

The singer-songwriter was spotted hanging out with Outer Banks actor Chase Stokes during the college football national championship game at Inglewood, California’s SoFi Stadium on Monday as the Georgia Bulldogs took on the TCU Horned Frogs.

Ballerini and Stokes were included in a group photo from the game that Raising Canes founder Todd Graves shared on social media. The group also included Taylor Rooks, entrepreneur Jonathan Davis, Noah Beck and more.

Stokes later shared a carousel of photos, including a pic of himself seated beside a blonde woman as they watched the game together. He tagged Ballerini in the photo. Ballerini commented on the post, saying, “Go Vols,” a nod to her Knoxville, Tennessee, hometown football team, the Tennessee Volunteers.

In August, Ballerini revealed her split from husband and fellow country artist Morgan Evans. Ballerini and Evans met in March 2016 while both were co-hosting the CMC Awards in Australia. They became engaged in December of that year and married Dec. 2, 2017, in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

“I’ve always tried to share my life with you in a real and vulnerable way, while also protecting layers of my personal life as they unfold,” Ballerini told fans via social media. “This is now public record so I wanted you to hear from me directly that I am going through a divorce.” Ballerini called the “deeply difficult decision” a “result of a journey of love, growth and effort that ultimately has come to an end.”

Last year, Ballerini also released the album Subject to Change, spearheaded by the album’s first single, “Heartfirst.” At the Grammy Awards on Feb. 5, the song is nominated in the best country solo performance category.

Lisa Marie Presley — the only child of Elvis Presley — died Thursday (Jan. 12) after being hospitalized earlier that day, her mother said in a statement. The singer was 54.

“It is with a heavy heart that I must share the devastating news that my beautiful daughter Lisa Marie has left us,” Priscilla Presley said in a statement. “She was the most passionate, strong and loving woman I have ever known.”

The announcement came just hours after Priscilla Presley had confirmed that Lisa Marie Presley was rushed to the hospital earlier Thursday.

Los Angeles County paramedics were dispatched to a Calabasas home at 10:37 a.m. following a report of a woman in full cardiac arrest, according to Craig Little, a spokesperson for the county’s fire department. Property records indicate Presley was a resident at that address.

Paramedics arrived about six minutes later, Little said. A subsequent statement from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said paramedics performed CPR and “determined the patient had signs of life” before taking her to the hospital immediately.

The city of Calabasas is nestled between the foothills of the Santa Monica and the Santa Susanna Mountains, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) northwest of downtown Los Angeles.

Presley, 54, attended the Golden Globes on Tuesday, on hand to celebrate Austin Butler’s award for playing her father in Elvis. She called his performance “mind-blowing” during a red carpet interview with Entertainment Tonight.

“I really didn’t know what to do with myself after I saw it,” she told ET of Baz Luhrmann’s movie. “I had to take, like, five days to process it because it was so incredible and so spot on and just so authentic that, yeah, I can’t even describe what it meant.”

Just days before that, she was in Memphis, Tennessee, at Graceland — the mansion where Elvis lived — to celebrate the 88th anniversary of her father’s birth on Jan. 8.

A representative for Lisa Marie Presley had no comment when reached by The Associated Press.

Presley had two top 10 albums on the Billboard 200 — To Whom It May Concern (No. 5 in 2003) and Now What (No. 9 in 2005). “Lights Out,” a single from To Whom It May Concern, was critically acclaimed and hit Billboard‘s Adult Pop Airplay (No. 18 peak) and Pop Airplay charts (No. 34) in 2003.

“Lights Out,” a single from To Whom It May Concern, was critically acclaimed and bubbled under the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 114.

Presley was married four times, to musician Danny Keough (1988-94), pop icon Michael Jackson (1994-96), actor Nicolas Cage (2002-04) and music producer Michael Lockwood (2006-21). Jackson also died young. He was just 50 when he succumbed in 2009.

Presley recently penned an essay published in People about “the horrific reality” of her grief following her son Benjamin Keough’s death by suicide in 2020.

“I’ve dealt with death, grief and loss since the age of 9 years old. I’ve had more than anyone’s fair share of it in my lifetime and somehow, I’ve made it this far,” she wrote in August.

Presley is also the mother of actor Riley Keough and twin daughters. Keogh’s representatives didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

With Tuesday’s flurry of festival lineups — including Boston Calling, Bonnaroo, Sonic Temple Festival, and, finally, Coachella — the 2023 North American festival season formally kicked off, and music fans can expect more announcements to follow.  

This figurative ringing of the bell is typically reserved for Coachella (and Coachella alone), which usually announces its lineup the first week of January. But when Los Angeles-based concert promoter Goldenvoice didn’t deliver on time — for unexplained reasons — it left some executives wondering what to expect from potential ripple effects throughout the festival circuit.  

That’s due to Coachella’s contracts and stature in the business. Coachella’s artist contracts come with radius clauses that give the Southern California festival first right to announce its artist lineup in the region. As such, festivals have worked out a largely unspoken schedule for announcing their lineups after Coachella goes first, and then navigating similar first-announce and radius clauses other major festivals may have. 

In this case, Live Nation-owned festivals Boston Calling and Bonnaroo booked 070 Shake, Sofi Tukker and Knocked Out, who were playing Coachella as well. Both lineups were slated to drop on Jan. 10 — but with the morning of the 10th approaching and no Coachella lineup announced, agents for the acts had to check in with Goldenvoice to let them know about the Bonnaroo and Boston Calling announcements.  

Making things more complicated was that both Live Nation-owned festivals, along with the Danny Wimmer Presents-owned Sonic Temple Festival in Columbus, Ohio, had coordinated their lineup announcements to take place hours apart on Jan. 10 at the request of the Foo Fighters, who wanted a somber announcement surrounding their return to the stage following longtime drummer Taylor Hawkins’ death last March. 

Goldenvoice president/CEO Paul Tollett told the agencies there was no problem with the lineup announcements happening before Coachella, and a small dustup was easily avoided. The episode, however, is illustrative of how a small group of concert promoters, powerful booking agents and contract attorneys regulate and protect the music festival industry. 

At the top of that system is Coachella, a cultural and economic juggernaut that sells more than $100 million worth of tickets each year over two weekends in mid-April, making it the first major festival to take place each year. In order to protect the massive investment in artist fees it pays each year, AEG-owned Goldenvoice requires artists to sign radius clauses agreeing not to announce their participation in festivals that take place in California, or in states neighboring California, until after their performance at Coachella. Artists participating in festivals in states not neighboring California generally only have to wait until after the Coachella lineup announcement before publicizing their involvement in other events. 

Today, most major festivals use radius clauses to restrict participating artists from performing at competing events that fall too close geographically or chronologically. Managing this complex web of obligations and radius clauses typically falls on an artist’s booking agent, who negotiates the agreements between festivals and artists while managing their client’s radius clause obligations throughout the touring cycle.  

In order to avoid violating each other’s radius clauses, since 2014, festivals that take place in the first part of the year have worked on a schedule starting in the first week of January for announcing their lineups. From 2014 to 2020, the lineup for Coachella was announced during the first week of January. But for the last two years, following the pandemic and the cancellation of the 2020 and 2021 festivals, Coachella’s lineup announcement hasn’t taken place until the second week of January, causing minor delays to festival lineup announcements that have traditionally followed Coachella.  

While some of Coachella’s critics say the festival’s pole position in the lineup announcement hierarchy affords Goldenvoice far too much power over smaller festivals, one booking agent told Billboard that Tollett is “exactly the type of person you want in that position.” 

“He wants to protect his event, which he spends tens of millions of dollars on each year. He’s first in line because his event is the major festival each year,” says the agent. “But if he needs a little more time to announce his festival, he’s going to accommodate the requests of any festival he impacts. He’s fair and always does the right thing.”