Kelsea Ballerini – Peter Pan

No woman in country music had sent her first three singles to No.1, and the one that broke the record was two years old

Three singles, three No.1s. When Peter Pan reached the top of Billboard’s Country Airplay chart in the fall of 2016, Kelsea Ballerini became the first woman in the chart’s history to have sent her first three releases there, and the run had a second record folded inside it: the same week, the song also topped Hot Country Songs, which no woman had managed with a single before. She was 22 years old and signed to an independent label in Nashville that most of the industry could not have named.

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The record itself was old news by then. It had been cut in 2014, before the debut album existed, in a writing session that started with Jesse Lee walking in with a hook and ended with a finished master. Lee brought the idea to Ballerini and Forest Glen Whitehead; the first verse took a few minutes and then the three of them spent most of the day on the chorus and the second verse, which is the ordinary arithmetic of songwriting — the easy part arrives first and the rest is work. They recorded it the same day, with Lee and Whitehead singing the background parts themselves. Whitehead produced it with Jason Massey. Then it went onto The First Time as track two and waited ten months while Black River worked two other singles.

Those two singles are why the third one mattered. Love Me Like You Mean It had topped Country Airplay in 2015, making Ballerini the first woman since Carrie Underwood in 2006 to get there with a debut release, and Dibs followed it. Both were bright, quick, flirtatious records — the kind country radio in the mid-2010s would take from a new woman, in a format that was playing very few of them at all. Peter Pan was the slow one. It is a breakup song built on the least forgiving idea in the catalog of breakup songs, which is that the other person is not a villain, just someone who was never going to come down.

The video puts her on the ground

Kristin Barlowe directed the clip in the desert outside Las Vegas, and the concept takes the metaphor and makes it literal in a way that could easily have been silly and isn’t. The boyfriend throws himself at cars, motorcycles and planes; Ballerini watches. She spends the entire video being the one who stays on the ground, which is a strange and fairly brave thing to build a promotional film around at that stage of a career, when the pressure is to be the most interesting thing on screen. It was nominated for Video of the Year at the 2017 ACM Awards and at the CMT Music Awards, and won Country Favorite Song at the Radio Disney Music Awards.

The numbers came in behind it. The single entered the Hot 100 at No.92 in June 2016, climbed for fourteen weeks, and peaked at No.35 in the same week it took both country charts — still her highest placing on the pop chart. It stayed on the Hot 100 for twenty weeks, went platinum that November and double platinum later, and had sold 672,000 copies in America by March 2017. Canada took it to No.4 on its country chart. Black River threw the No.1 party in a Nashville airplane hangar on October 12, 2016, with the writers standing beside her; it was the first chart-topper Jesse Lee had ever had.

Since Peter Pan she has joined the Grand Ole Opry, added more Country Airplay No.1s, coached on network television, and made five albums, the most recent of them the kind of record an artist makes once nobody can tell her what the single should be. The history-making one, though, was made first — three people in a room in 2014 with a hook and no particular reason to think it would matter, writing the song where she stopped being charming and started being exact.