Bebe Rexha Calls Kelsea Ballerini ‘an Incredibly Kind Soul’ (Exclusive)

Bebe Rexha is currently on tour with the Jonas Brothers as part of the group’s Happiness Begins Tour, and fans in Nashville got a major surprise during the Sept. 10 show in Music City when Rexha brought Kelsea Ballerini on stage to sing Rexha’s duet with Florida Georgia Line, “Meant to Be.”

“I hit her up and I asked her if she was going to be in Nashville when I was there and she’s like, ‘Oh my God it’s my birthday. I’m actually celebrating it,’” Rexha told PopCulture.com of her decision to call Ballerini. “So I just asked her, ‘Well do you want to come on stage with me?’ And we kind of spoke about it, and then I hit her up the day before like, ‘Hey, do we still want to do this?” She’s like, “Yeah, but what are we going to sing?’ I was like, ‘Why don’t you just come up for the the last song? For ‘Meant to Be?’” And she’s like, ‘I’m totally down.’ So she came, we hung out a little bit and she’s just so cool.”

“Every time I see her somewhere she’s honestly so cool and so nice, and I just really get along with her,” Rexha shared. “She’s just really an incredibly kind soul. There’s no competitiveness. It’s just all good vibes. And I just like her as a human being. It’s really nice when I meet people that are actually like so nice in the industry, you know? It makes me so happy. She’s so kind and so sweet.”

Ballerini is nearly finished working on her third studio album, and while Rexha revealed that she was too late to contribute to the project, she’s open to the idea of writing with the “Miss Me More” singer in the future.

“I actually hit her up, but she had already submitted her track listing, with some songs, and I was literally like a week too late and she already submitted everything in, but I would love to write with her,” she said.

Supporting her fellow female artists is important to Rexha, who partnered with Bumble for the Empowered by Bumble Bizz campaign, which sent winner Shilan Douglas to San Francisco for a mentorship with Rexha during a music festival the “Not 20 Anymore” singer was performing at.

“I was just kind of thinking about myself when I was starting out, how much I would have loved that,” Rexha reflected of the experience. “Just to talk to somebody and get their advice and their opinions, and I just like helping people. I like to give back. They sent me a whole bunch of artists, and they were actually all really amazing. Actually had a hard time picking, and yeah, it just felt right.”

Rexha has been working in the music industry for nearly 10 years, and shared that things have definitely changed since she got her start.

“When I started out everybody put their music on MySpace and SoundCloud and it was a different time,” she recalled. “Now I think a lot of people are on Instagram and YouTube and Twitter and Musical.ly, and it just shifted in a different way where it’s definitely a lot more visual as well. There’s a lot more people on the Internet now. There’s so much more. So it’s a lot harder to break through.”

Photo Credit: PopCulture.com / Dylan Skye Aycock