Jelly Roll Says It Took a Long Time to Stop Thinking Like a Criminal

T
he election may be just a few weeks away, but don’t ask Jelly Roll for voting advice. As a convicted felon who spent time in and out of jail for robbery and drug possession, country music’s face-tattooed star lost his right to cast a ballot. “People go, ‘Why don’t you tell people to vote for somebody?’ ” he says during a break in rehearsals for his headlining arena tour. “You want me to tell people to vote for a system that won’t let me vote? Fucking c’mon now.”

But on his new album, Beautifully Broken (out Oct. 11), the Grammy-nominated singer-rapper — born Jason DeFord in the hardscrabble Nashville suburb of Antioch — tries to steer fans toward their own personal brand of redemption. In the song “Winning Streak,” for example, he takes on the character of an alcoholic who receives a necessary reminder at an AA meeting: “Nobody walks through these doors on a winning streak.” “There’s a lot of people that need to hear that in life,” Jelly says. “Everybody is coming off a loss, baby.”

You and I first met in 2014, and you predicted that you’d break in pop music, not in country. The opposite happened.
Man made plans, and God laughs. I had got to a fork in the road. I dropped “Save Me,” and as it’s going extremely viral, I started fielding record deals. I’m sitting in a room with a guy that’s going, “Man, I think you’re a pop artist. You’re country or Southern, but you have critical mass appeal.” But I thought “Save Me” was a country song. So I chose to go with the Nashville label [Stoney Creek Records] instead of the pop side.

Do you think you would have the same success if you had taken the pop deal?
I think they’d have found out I was country.

Who was the guy I met in 2014 compared to now?
I was so fucking close then. It’s crazy that it took another decade to get to where we are right now. That was the very beginning of me finding my voice and being like, “Alright, we’re fixing to venture into these other kind of little side quests.” I was already kind of singing choruses, but this was when I was starting to first sing verses. It’s right around the time I started really picking up the guitar and learning how to play. It was the beginning of this whole era for me.

The Jelly Roll story is about overcoming bad times. What are your bad days now?
Bad days are when I realize that I’m getting healthier, but that I’m still not at the best health place. Bad days are when I miss my kid — when the FaceTime ain’t enough, when you’re like, “Man, I wish we could sit on the couch and watch comedy.” Other than that, I don’t even think I have bad days anymore; I think I have bad moments.

You have your best friends’ names tattooed on your arms. Are you all still tight?
I’m looking down on my right wrist right now and it says “Rell.” Rell is coming on this tour to work with my wife. I see Mondo, God rest his soul, he passed away. I see R-Dub. He just got married. We’re still dear friends. These are all my Antioch guys. I see Hylyte on my left arm, who was my original DJ. We started together 17 years ago, right when I got out of jail. When I was in a position where I was like, “Yo, we should hire a DJ,” it was a no-brainer. He’s with me now DJing the whole tour.

What do your old Antioch friends think about your success?
They are so understanding of where I’m at. These guys will see me every four months at a show. They’re never bitter about it, never upset, just always a big smile, always glad to be around. Now, there are obviously people where I’m from that don’t feel that way. They feel like I don’t do enough, and no matter how much I do for the city, if you’re not doing for them directly… you know what I mean? Everybody has an opinion of how you should be when you are successful.

You went to barber college. Do you still cut today?
I did it just long enough to realize I didn’t want to do it. I love cutting hair, but I didn’t realize it was such a stationary job. When you’re doing it in jail, everything is stationary, right? But when you’re out in the free world, I was like, “I think I got too much ‘want to run’ in me to do this.” But I braided my daughter’s hair in the last year. I knew how to do that my whole life, when I was a teenager in juvenile. I can do under braids, over braids, French style. I’m a bad man.

Jimmy Fallon and Howard Stern watched you play at a celebrity party in the Hamptons this summer. How did you fit in there?
I felt like white trash on Wall Street. I felt really good out there! The crazy part is I didn’t get to meet hardly any of them, but they were all there, and I heard they liked the show, which was really cool. I walked in and somebody came back going, “Howard wants to holler at Jelly.” So I come out and I’m like, “I know you don’t hug.” Howard’s like, “I hug Jelly!” He gives me a big hug, and Jason Bateman looks up and goes, “Fuck, did y’all have a sleepover?” 

What’s the message of Beautifully Broken?
I knew early in this project that this was my exploration of mental health, this was my exploration of addiction, and this was my exploration of detox. These were the feelings that seemed to surround what we were writing. I took a lot of pride in the top line of this album, every lyric I fought for. It took me 18 months to write this album. I got a lot of music, man. I wrote a lot of songs.

You have a song called “Hey Mama” about your wife Bunnie Xo that’s like Ozzy Osbourne’s “Mama, I’m Coming Home.”
I’m a huge Ozzy fan and that’s one of my favorite Ozzy songs. You know what’s important about [my] song? A lot of times I write from the perspective of where I come from, or from the perspective of who I represent to get [listeners] to look at things differently. This was a glimpse of me getting to write what I’m doing right now. We wrote that at sunrise at a Pilot station. It’s got that old truck stop feeling. I wanted that song to feel like the morning dew when you get off the bus to piss at 5:15.

MGK features on “Time of Day.” How’d that come to be?
And Yelawolf is doing the harmony “Ooohs!” I had the chorus from a session I had with Ilsey, and we just couldn’t land it. I’m sitting with MGK one night in the studio, and I’m like, “Yo, man, you’ve got to hear this hook I got.” And then he hears that chorus [sings] “I dont cry like I do/ cause I know these tears will wash my sins away” and I just see goosebumps on his arm. When Yela walks in, MGK is like, “Yo, give me a melody on here.” And we had Yela be a part of the record. It was a cool rock & roll behind-the-scenes moment, like how Waylon and Willie used to do! That’s the shit we were on, like, Waylon and Willie.

Wiz Khalifa is also on the LP on “Higher Than Heaven.”
I love Wiz. I love the culture that Wiz has always represented, his longevity, the staying power he’s had. Wiz is one of those guys that you can never count out, because every couple of years he’ll have one of the biggest songs. I just love everything about him as a human too, how he parents. We connect as friends. So I hit him one night. It was like, “Yo, man. I got a weed country song. It’s got a really cool vibe and I think you could spit on it.” He was like, “Send it over right now.” So I hit him… and what I love about rappers is, that motherfucker was back that night! He sent it right back.

You play a character at an AA meeting in the song “Winning Streak,” but you’re not sober. How did you get into that head space?
I got a really unique relationship with sobriety. The short version of it is, I might drink a little, I might smoke a lot, but I needed help to get off the stuff that was going to kill me. I know some people are like, “I’m not smoking weed ever, it’ll spiral me into drugs,” but I can say that that program helped me with some of the stuff I was struggling with.

In “Unpretty,” you sing, “I never thought I’d see the day when I’d forgive myself and say ‘I hate the man I used to be.’ ” Heavy stuff.
For better or worse, we are an accumulation of everything that ever happened to us, and I think that we have to wear that. This is the first time I probably talked about this, but I’m 15 to 20 years removed from being a real criminal, and I don’t think like a criminal at all. It took a long time to quit thinking that way. I used to look at it like I wouldn’t wish jail on my worst enemy. Now, I’m like, “If that dude did that, and he got time, he deserved it.” It’s such a paradigm shift on how I look at society as a whole. 

Were you thinking like a criminal 10 years ago?
I still definitely had very criminal thoughts at times. I would get nervous when the police were behind me. I could be sober as a judge and straight as a harpoon, but I would still be like, “Uh-oh, a cop.” Now, when the cops are behind me, I almost want to wave at them and say hi. 

Do you ever?
I go out of my way to greet ’em. They love it, man, because they know how hard it is [to go straight]. I got a chain made for this tour: It’s a set of handcuffs for every time I was arrested that lead to a key to the jail that I was locked up in, that the sheriff gave me personally. This is my redemption chain.