Just past the halfway mark on country artist Jelly Roll’s new 22-track album lies a sequence of songs in which he grapples with his celebrity. They offer sagas of homesickness for Tennessee while he’s out on the road “doin’ what I gotta”, and of friends who suggest fame has changed the man born Jason Bradley DeFord. “The old me’s not the new me, but the old me’s still inside,” he protests. The songs sometimes swagger, as you might expect: now 39, Jelly Roll has escaped a life of poverty, addiction and criminality (“born in the struggle” as he puts it) and now finds himself being profiled by Jon Bon Jovi in Interview magazine. “Ain’t no climb that’s ever too steep,” he avers, “waters rise but they’re never too deep.” Equally, his lyrics occasionally hint at the odd tussle with impostor syndrome – “I don’t think I deserve the time of day” – but ultimately conclude that the good outweighs the bad: “These roads got their twists and turns,” he sings on Hey Mama, “but I damn sure love it.”
This is nothing we haven’t heard before from the newly famous, but you can forgive DeFord for dwelling on the subject. Before his 2020 track Save Me propelled him into the spotlight, he had spent more than 15 years on the margins, a white Nashville MC hustling CD-R mixtapes and self-released collaborative albums (so many that Beautifully Broken counts as something like his 39th full-length release). It was an artistic environment vaguely adjacent to the country-rap scene depicted in a 2018 Rolling Stone feature: a largely hidden world of festivals held at Georgia mud bogs, where Maga politics predominate and CD sales outstrip Spotify figures because many fans live so rurally that their internet connections can’t handle streaming. This scene, the article concluded, is likely to stay hidden – the implication being that it is just too unapologetically redneck for any of its artists to find mass acceptance.
And yet today Jelly Roll is very much in the mainstream of US pop, garlanded with Grammy nominations (on stage at one of the aforementioned mud bog festivals, his sometime collaborator Struggle Jennings urged the audience to sing along “loud enough that Jelly Roll can hear you at the CMAs”), a US Top 3 album in last year’s Whitsitt Chapel and with one track from Beautifully Broken, Get By, already selected as one US network’s theme for the 2024 college football season.
This is mainly thanks to his lyrics about his history of addiction and repeat prison stays (his live shows, Variety noted, resemble a cross between “a 12-step meeting and a revival show”) and a gradual pivot away from hip-hop towards straightforward country-rock. The acoustic Save Me was an outlier on 2020’s Self Medicated, an album primarily driven by trap beats, and Whitsitt Chapel confined the rap influence to a single collaboration with Yelawolf. Beautifully Broken completes the turn. Wiz Khalifa turns up on Higher Than Heaven, but he’s singing rather than rapping; so is Machine Gun Kelly – in raw-throated grunge-y style – on Time of Day.
In fact, the album’s main currency is stadium-ready pop-rock of various hues, ranging from sombre, Coldplay-esque pianos on Winning Streak to Get By’s grizzled take on Ed Sheeran, specifically the Ed Sheeran of Sing. The country influence is largely confined to a little banjo or pedal steel and floor-stomping rhythms, before breaking into standard arena-size boom-thwack. Subtly abetted by Nashville’s equivalent of pop songwriters-for-hire, the songs are well written enough to carry you along, but the originality, such as it is, comes from DeFord’s gravelly, untutored voice and the lyrical fixation on addiction.
The stuff about fame and Higher Than Heaven’s incongruous paean to marijuana notwithstanding, the vast majority of its tracks stick with the story of DeFord’s past struggles: there are songs called My Cross, What’s Wrong With Me, When the Drugs Don’t Work and I Am Not OK. Bedecked with strings or massed gospelly backing vocals, the musical climaxes occasionally suggest a new dawn, but the words are concerned with the darkness before it. They are frank and occasionally spiked with a likable dose of wit – the protagonist of Winning Streak finds a sobriety meeting leaves him “wishing I was wasted” – but you do leave Beautifully Broken wondering how much longer anyone can stick with one topic, however noble and altruistic their intentions in doing so.
It’s a thought that seems to have occurred to DeFord: “It takes more than an album now to set this sinner free,” he sings on Get By, as if pre-empting the criticism. For now, it’s the grit that elevates the gloss of Beautifully Broken into something more vital than your standard Nashville pop fare. But what happens when it starts to feel like a brand? Then, you suspect, Jelly Roll is in for another, rather different struggle.
This week Alexis listened to
Joan As Police Woman – Remember the Voice
This nocturnal-sounding song is appropriately named: its power lies in the contrast between the richness of Joan Wasser’s vocal and the icily austere synths.
