JCountry artist Jelly Rollin is halfway through his new 22-track album. They provide Tennessee with tales of homesickness while he's on the “doing what I've got to do” route, and fame-suggesting friends have replaced Jason Bradley Deford as born. “The old me is not new, but the old me is still inside,” he protests. The songs sometimes swagger, as you'd expect: Now 39, Jelly Roll escaped poverty, slavery and a life of crime (“born to struggle,” as he says) as he now describes himself in a Jon Bon Jovi interview magazine. . “There's never a very steep climb,” he says, “and the waters rise, but they're never deep.” Likewise, his lyrics occasionally hint at the odd bout with impostor syndrome – “I don't think I'm worth the time of day” – but ultimately conclude that the good outweighs the bad: “These roads got their twists and turns,” he sings. Then hey uncle said, “But I sure like it.”
It's nothing we haven't heard from the newly famous, but you can forgive Deford in this case. Before his 2020 single Save Me catapulted him into the spotlight, he spent more than 15 years on the fringes, a white Nashville MC hustling CD-R mixtapes and self-released collaborative albums (counting as many as Beautifully Broken , his 39th full-length release). It was an art scene in a 2018 Rolling Stone feature: The Hidden World of Festivals in the Georgia Mud Swamps, Where Mega Politics Dominate and CD Sales Outpace Spotify Statistics Because Many Fans Live in Rural Areas Because Their Internet Connections Can't Handle Streaming. The scene is likely to have disappeared – the implication being that any of its artists are too unabashedly redneck to find mass acceptance.
Today Jelly Roll remains in the mainstream of American pop music, decorated with Grammy nominations (on stage at one of the aforementioned Mud Swamp festivals, his sometime collaborator Struggle Jennings urged the audience to sing loud enough to hear Jelly Roll. You at the CMAS”), last year's US Top 3 album. Along with a track from Whitsit Chapel and Beautifully Broken, Get Already has been chosen as one of the USA Network's themes for the 2024 college football season.
That's largely thanks to his lyrics about his drug addiction and repeated incarceration (his live shows, Variety noted, resemble a cross between “a 12-step meeting and a revival show”) and his gradual move away from hip-hop to straight-up country-rock. Acoustically, Save Me is 2020's Self-Medicated, an album driven by trap beats, and Whitsit Chappell's rap influence is limited to a single collaboration with Yelawolf. Breaks beautifully and completes the turn. Wiz Khalifa sings Higher Than Heaven, but he sings more than raps; Machine Gun Kelly – in a raw-throat grunge-y style – daytime.
Indeed, the album's main currency is stadium-ready pop-rock of various hues, from the sombre, Coldplay-esque pianos on Winning Streak to the grizzled take on Ed Sheeran, especially Ed Sheeran of Sing. The country influence is often limited to a little banjo or pedal steel and floor-stomping rhythms, before breaking into a standard stadium-sized boom-thwack. Subtly backed by pop songwriters on par with Nashville's pop songwriters, the songs are well-written enough to take you in, but such originality comes from DeFord's smooth, untutored voice and lyrics about slavery.
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Although there are things about fame and marijuana and the incongruous bane of Heaven, most of its songs stick to the story of Deford's past struggles: My Cross, What's Wrong With What's With, When the Drugs Don't Work and I. I'm not okay. Embellished with strings or massed gospel backing vocals, the musical climaxes occasionally suggest a new dawn, but the lyrics are about the darkness before it. They're frank and occasionally admirably clever – Winning Streak's protagonist finds a sober rendezvous and leaves him saying “I'm wasted” – but you're pretty torn on how long you can stick to a title, however noble and altruistic their motives in doing so.
It's a thought that occurred to Tifford: “It's gonna take more than an album now to set this sinner free,” he sings on Get By, as if to offer criticism. For now, that's what elevates Beautifully Broken's shine to something more substantial than your standard Nashville pop fare. But what happens when it starts to feel like a brand? And then, as you might suspect, Jelly Roll is engaged in another, different struggle.
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