If you saw Kelsea Ballerini perform her song “I Sit in Parks” during November’s CMA Awards and thought, “That’s one of the best songs I’ve heard all year” – well, you weren’t alone.
The song has been chosen as one of Rolling Stone’s 100 Best Songs of 2025, and it’s one of the very few country tracks on the list; it comes in at #90. The publication notes, “Kelsea Ballerini dropped the most honest country song of the year with this just over two-minute diary entry about all that she’s sacrificed in pursuit of her career. … [H]er bare emotion makes the song a must-hear for anyone who’s set aside life in favor of work.”
Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Kelsea actually mentions Rolling Stone in the lyrics of “I Sit in Parks.”
HARDY also has a song on the list: “Luckiest Man Alive,” from his Country! Country! album, comes in at #87. While Rolling Stone notes that the song isn’t a single, it adds, “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t one of the most feel-good sing-along pop country songs of the year.”
Calling it a “three-minute earworm,” the publication writes, “It may contain just about all the Music Row tropes the genre gets ridiculed for (jacked-up truck, SEC football, and a Hank [Williams] Jr. quote? Check, check, and check), but it sure works.”
Much higher up on the list is Hailey Whitters‘ “High on the Hog,” coming in at #64. Rolling Stone describes it as a “whip-smart, fiddle-heavy travelogue about the trials and travails of being an aspiring heartland country star” and praises its “throwback earworm arrangement that conjures everyone from Miranda Lambert to Alan Jackson.”
By the way, Rolling Stone’s #1 song of 2025 is Lady Gaga‘s “Abracadabra.”
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