We’ve all had the experience of being in a bad emotional place and, in response, putting on a song. We know that song isn’t going to fix the problem, whatever it may be, or even change the feeling. But the music we turn to when we’re struggling can be like a hand on our shoulder. For a legion of Americans today, the music that does that is by Jelly Roll.
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Jelly’s real name is Jason DeFord, and he’s from Antioch, Tenn. He’s 39 years old, burly (though he’s trying to lose weight), with a face covered in tattoos. In a sign of the breadth of his audience, he has been able to score on the country, rock and pop charts with hit singles like “Need a Favor” and albums like 2023’s “Whitsitt Chapel.” His southern-rock and hip-hop-inflected country songs are almost all about clawing toward some semblance of stability, which is an experience that informs a lot of his music, because it’s one he knows well. Jelly was in and out of prison starting as a teenager and into his mid-20s. He has dealt with personal loss and substance-abuse issues — both his own and that of his teenage daughter’s mother. He has also dealt with the professional despair of a long run to nowhere as an aspiring rapper. But that’s before he switched to singing and, beginning in 2021, started to hit it big.
The musician — one half of a down-home power couple with his wife, Bunnie Xo, who hosts the popular Dumb Blonde podcast — will set off on a cross-country headlining arena tour later this month. He also has a new, highly-anticipated album, “Beautifully Broken,” scheduled for release this fall. He is, by any measure, a star — and still figuring out just what that means.
Can you share some of the things that fans come up and tell you? I’ve heard it all, Bubba. I’ve heard everything from “Your music was played at my daughter’s funeral; she had an accidental overdose” to “Your song helped me get through rehab; I listened to ‘Save Me’ on repeat for 30 days straight.” Or “It was our morning song before we did our gratitude list.” Yeah, everything from funerals to hospitals to recovery centers. I’ve heard the good stories, too: “I got sober.” It’s crazy, the range of emotions.
Is it ever hard for you to be the recipient of that? Nah, I feel honored that I have a purpose. I spent so much of my life being counterproductive to society that to be in a place where I’m able to help people has completely changed my mentality.
It never feels as if fans are asking something from you that’s more than you can give? That happens outside of fans telling me their stories. I’ll cry with a fan in Aisle 3 of a grocery store over a real cathartic story, and I’ll get in my car feeling better about life. But I see a missed email from a friend, like, “Hey, you’ve been blowing me off for five months”; they’re kind of laying into me. It hurts your feelings. Because you’re like, “You have no understanding of where I’m at in my life right now.” I just have to be honest and say I have no priority outside of what I’m doing musically and my direct family. That’s all I have time for. I’ve lost a lot of friends over that.
I want to ask a question about your wife. I saw something online where she was commemorating the one-year anniversary of being able to give up sex work. She said you two used to have conversations, and you’d said something like, “One day you’re not going to have to do this kind of work anymore.” Do you remember when that day came? Well, we had the conversation early, when we were dreamers laying in bed together and I was really broke and she was pretty broke. That was our dream. To see it come to fruition has been unbelievable. It’s a modern American fairy tale. It’s this kind of white trash-y one, but it’s poetic and beautiful in this [expletive] up way.
But was there a day when she said to you, “I don’t have to do that work anymore”? Even when Bunnie posted that, I was like, “Yo, you know that was two or three years now.” I think that was her having a vulnerable moment of “it feels like it’s been a year since I walked away.” We’ve also been in a vortex, David. You gotta remember that days and nights are starting to blend together. The fact that I dropped [the song] “Son of a Sinner” in 2021 blows my mind.
I was sent eight or nine of your new songs. They’re about Jelly Roll subjects: addiction, adversity. Given that your life is in a better place, is it harder to come up with that kind of material? First of all, I hear these stories every night. I hear what the songs are doing for people. All of a sudden, what I thought was just my story becomes the story of tens of millions. It’s deeper than my story. This is my child’s mother’s story, who’s still actively in and out of jail and in her addiction. [Jelly Roll’s daughter’s mother could not be reached for comment.] That’s how close this still is to my house, regardless of the size of my house. I still have family members that just got out of rehab. Think about this perspective: I lived a really [expletive] life for 20 years. I’ve lived a pretty unbelievable, amazing life for 24 months. I’m still catching up.
How have you talked with your kids about the period in your life when you were in and out of prison? I’ve always been honest. Bailee was different, my oldest, because of what her mother was dealing with. I was trying to describe what addiction was to an 8-year-old without using words like “addiction” or “drugs.”
Is that possible? I believe that it’s a disease. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced a drug addict really close to you. Have you?
I have not. The strangest thing happens, man. Somebody you’ve known your entire life turns into a different person. I’ve had it happen to baby-mothers, cousins, biological brothers. It is unbelievable what it does. The way we tried to explain it is that your mother’s struggling with something, it’s a medical thing.
The new album is coming in the fall. In what ways do you see it as moving the Jelly Roll story forward? I don’t think about me being on Act 2. Right now it’s just trying to impact as many people as we can while God is giving us a platform. Plus, I don’t know me. I don’t know how I’m going to feel after I do this for a few more years or what God’s going to send my way. I might go to college. I came from nothing, dude! I might want to learn something. I might come intern under you for a year! I don’t know. I’m looking for songs that have purpose. When I go to put out a song under the name Jelly Roll, I think to myself, Why? Because for the first time in my life, it has nothing to do with a financial decision. I’m well past putting out anything for money. So, now, it really is a why. Songs like “Winning Streak,” that’s a why.
That’s from the new album. “Winning Streak” describes somebody going to an A.A. meeting in a church basement. Is alcohol addiction something you’ve struggled with? Or are you playing a character in that song? I was writing from the perspective of a story I’ve seen happen for real. So I’m sitting in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and my deal is, I will have a cocktail every now and then and I’m a known weed smoker, but I got away from the drugs that I knew were going to kill me. It was really hard for me to get away from those drugs. Something I do to maintenance my relationship with those drugs is I still attend the meetings but I never share. I just quietly sit and appreciate the message and the meaning. This is the first time that I’ve talked about this publicly. I don’t tell people I go to meetings. So I just sit and I watch, and this kid, he’s going through it. You can tell. One of the old men sitting in there was like: “Look, man. It’s all good. Nobody came in here on a winning streak.” There it was. That was the beginning of “Winning Streak.”
You started as a rapper, and then not too long ago, you started singing. You can still find people criticizing you online, saying you’re inauthentically country. Why does the country world seem to care so much about who is really country and who is not? I don’t think they care as much as we think they do. I think it’s the textbook story of America right now. We’re listening to the smaller groups of people more than the larger groups. Really, 95 percent of the people agree, but we’re going to live and die on them five. Duplicate that in every process of being an American and we wonder why the country is so sideways. But this is an age-old story that goes for every genre. Man, I’m gonna get in trouble: rock and roll’s problem was they allowed this same problem to create 30 subgenres of rock and roll.
Explain what you mean. It was just rock and roll and then they started, “Well, this is heavy, this isn’t heavy, this is more classic.” They started putting rock and roll in 30 different rock-and-roll boxes, and it became hard to follow. Country music has always been wide. Instead of subgenre-ing, they’ve been like, “We just accept the width of country music wherever it’s at.” Country music right now is somewhere between Colter Wall, Tyler Childers, Post Malone, Brandi Carlile, Sturgill Simpson and Morgan Wallen and Zach Bryan. That’s the beauty of country music. It’s always been wide like that.
Then why couldn’t Beyoncé get played on country radio? See, now you’re trying to put an entire genre into one part of what it does. I can tell you she dominated streaming and algorithmic radio with that record.
But country-radio programmers weren’t picking it up to the same extent. Yeah, but think about it this way: Is what she did the reason it opened up wide for Shaboozey to have the No. 5 on country radio? [Shaboozey actually made it all the way to no. 1.] There’s always somebody pushing it a little further. One could say that Willie [Nelson] and Merle [Haggard] — Johnny Cash had to walk so that they could run. One could say that Beyoncé had to crawl so Shaboozey could walk.
I want to go back to your struggles. You first were incarcerated when you were about 14? Yes, sir. It might go back a year before that. I got caught with a cannabis charge in Antioch and a pack of cigarettes as a juvenile. They cited me, and the cop trusted me to take the citation to my family and go to court. [Laughs.] Which, of course, I didn’t. So the police had to show up and haul me to jail. That was at 13. At 14 I think it was a schoolyard fight.
You were in and out of prison until about 25 and then, famously in the Jelly Roll story, you were inside and somebody told you your daughter was born, and that was your epiphany. You said, “I gotta change my life.” But was there anything someone could have done before then that could have changed the path you were on? I’m not sure….
Read More: Jelly Roll Cannot Believe How His Life Turned Out
