Interview: Jelly Roll

It’s a bit ironic to know the song that saved Jelly Roll’s music career is called “Save Me.”

The ballad 'Seeped in Despair' is getting a second life as a featured track on Jelly Roll’s new album, “Whitsitt Chapel,” as a duet with Lainey Wilson. A key lyric goes: “I’m a lost cause/Baby don’t waste your time on me/I’m so damaged beyond repair/Life has shattered my hopes and dreams.”

“Save Me” first appeared in a stark acoustic guitar-and-vocal version on Jelly Roll’s 2020 independently released album “Self Medicated” and the success the man born as Jason DeFord is enjoying now can be traced back to that song.

“For lack of a better word, ‘Save Me’ went viral,” Jelly Roll said in a recent phone interview. “It was undeniable. I had built a pretty good career. Keep in mind, I had a billion views on my YouTube show. But I couldn’t get, I was missing that one song that made people go ‘Oh, OK, this guy can do it all.’ I think ‘Save Me’ was that.”

Soon Jelly Roll was getting meetings with multiple record labels. He said the labels had plenty of ideas for his music, but it wasn’t until he met with Jon Loba, president of BMG Nashville, that he heard what he wanted to hear from a label.

“The cool thing was from go, Loba and everybody in the office sat me down and said the biggest thing we want from you is to do what you’ve been doing. It was awesome. I had complete creative control,” Jelly Roll said.

“Save Me,” however, wasn’t the song that put Jelly Roll on the radar of country and rock audiences.

First came “Dead Man Walking,” a robust rocker from his first album on BMG, 2021’s “Ballads of the Broken” that topped “Billboard” magazine’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart and pointed to Jelly Roll’s potential to cross genres. Then another song from that album, the rootsy acoustic ballad “Son of a Sinner,” topped the magazine’s Country Airplay chart and spent a record-setting 28 weeks atop the Emerging Artist chart, which tracks the most popular developing artists across all genres.

At the CMT Awards this past April, the tattooed, plus-sized singer took home three awards (including Male Video of the Year), and a month later, he further cemented his arrival as (possibly) country’s next big thing with a stirring performance of “Save Me” with Wilson at the ACM Awards.

Now “Whitsitt Chapel” is out and he is on a lengthy, highly anticipated headlining tour on the heels of his latest single “Need a Favor,” having topped the Country Airplay chart, while the version of “Save Me” with Wilson has climbed into the top 20. Jelly Roll is doing his best to make sure his show lives up to the expectations.

“Knowing we have a chance to touch so many people, we’ve spared no expense,” he said of the show, which will feature not only new songs, but selections dating back as far as to 2013. “I’m bringing tons of lights, video screens. Our goal is to kind of bring a mixture of a hip-hop show, a rock show, a country show and a little bit of a backroad tent revival.”

It’s quite a turn of fortune for someone who has openly admitted to making plenty of mistakes during his teens and 20s.

Growing up in the working-class Antioch neighborhood of Nashville, Jelly Roll, 38, lived under less-than-ideal circumstances. His parents divorced when he was 13 and his mother had issues with addiction and mental health.

Beginning in his teens, he ran afoul of the law, and over the next decade was in and out of jail for crimes that included robbery and drug possession with intent to distribute. He got into drugs himself, with cocaine, codeine, and Xanax among his substances of choice.

It was during one of those stints behind bars, though, that Jelly Roll was spurred to break his cycle of dead-end behavior. Informed by a guard that he had just become a father to a newborn daughter, he set his sights on trying to make something of himself. As a youngster, Jelly Roll had gotten into rap and hip-hop and had begun writing his own rhymes. By the time he was in eighth grade, he was handing out mix tapes hoping to draw attention to his music. He decided that music was his ticket to a better future.

“Finding purpose and wanting to be there for my daughter was the catalyst for it, but also just kind of a coming of age,” Jelly Roll said of his decision to straighten up his life. “It was the change of the heart that created that. The man changed. I just drug the music with me.”

Around 2009, Jelly Roll began releasing a steady stream of indie albums, mixtapes and singles, a few of which dented various charts as he built an underground following. His early music was predominantly rap and hip-hop, but as time went on, he began to broaden his sound.

“Ballads of the Broken” offered a preview of where Jelly Roll is now taking his music, as it spanned country, rock, pop and hip-hop.

“Whitsitt Chapel” offers a similar cross-genre appeal as it touches on country (“Save Me,” “Nail Me” and “Church”), muscular rock (“Halfway to Hell” and “The Lost”), hip-hop (“Unlive”) and songs that blend those styles (“Need A Favor”) with raw and emotional lyrics that continue to touch on his past struggles, but hint at the redemption he has started to attain.

It took some time and effort for Jelly Roll to find the direction of the album, as he set aside more than 70 songs he had written after he realized only two of those songs – “Church” and “Hungover in a Church Pew” – were calling to him.

“I said, ‘Man, these two songs kept kind of putting their hands up to me, ‘Church’ and ‘Church Pew,’” he said. “And about that time, my daughter started going to this little church out in the country. She was 14 at the time and I was like ‘Man, this is interesting. I went to a church and got baptized when I was 14, too, a little small church called Whitsitt Chapel, and I started telling her the story about the church.

“And my producer, Zach Crowell, sat me down and said ‘What was the name of that church you went to?’ (I said) ‘Whitsitt Chapel,’” Jelly Roll said. “He was like ‘You write songs that nobody else in this town could sing because they’re so personal to you.’ He said ‘Anybody in this town could have an album called ‘Going To Church.’ There’s only one person in this town who could have an album called ‘Whitsitt Chapel.’ That was the birth of the ‘Whitsitt Chapel’ album. Me and Zach Crowell scratched everything but those two songs and started from there.”

Jelly Roll sees himself growing as an artist on “Whitsitt Chapel,” particularly when it comes to his singing.

“I think the biggest musical thing that happened during this album for me was me learning how to sing between my last album and this one,” he said, noting he’s only now grasping concepts like pitch, octaves, flats and sharps. “So knowing my voice and learning my voice and figuring out my voice and how it fits on different songs and in different keys, I expect me to only get better at that over the next few years. Where most people are losing their voices in their 40s and 50s, I think mine will be at its strongest.”

Jelly Roll's Backroad Baptism Tour comes to the MIDFLORIDA Credit Union Amphitheatre at the FL State Fairgrounds in Tampa on Saturday, October 14. Click here for ticket information.