Jelly Roll has become one of the biggest superstars of country music in the past two years. But, of course, there are parts of the show-biz world that remain stubbornly country-uncognizant … those who are still not ready for that Jelly. And so, when the singer turned up on the Emmys performing his latest single, “I Am Not Okay,” during the “In Memoriam” segment, a lot of coastal viewers were surely processing things in real time, wondering aloud: Who is this heavily tatted, almost literally larger-than-life figure, and is his gritty ballad about depression and anxiety really the right way to send off Bob Newhart, Peter Marshall, et al.?
In the end, the answer to the latter question was probably yes, even if some would probably just prefer to hear “In My Life” performed every year in that slot. But it’s a yes because of who Jelly Roll is quickly becoming: America’s Counselor-in-Chief. He’s a guy who tells his audience that life is hard and, in the words of the song, “we’re not OK, but we’re gonna be all right” — which, as pep talks go, is fairly nuanced. It’s difficult to think of another chartbuster in music who’s devoted himself quite so much as Jelly Roll has to making hits out of songs about being thoroughly down-and-out but maybe, just maybe, seeing a light in the distance. This compulsion to lyrically dwell among the dregs might be a tough sell for almost anyone else, at least outside the genres of gospel or doom-metal. But Jelly Roll can pull off delving into these darker realms, with psychological room to spare, because he also happens to be the most jovial person in entertainment right now. You can get away with singing about hitting rock bottom — a lot — when a large swath of the nation is already aspiring just to get a hug from you someday.
Jelly Roll’s new album, “Beautifully Broken,” is his third since he made the switch from full-time rapper to full-time country crooner — a remarkably easy switch that seems to have coincided with the last stages of his transition from self-confessed bad dude to motivational-speaking big brother. Some of his songs deal with the vagaries of poor self-image, and looking for a way out, or up, without specifically attaching substance abuse to the mental health concerns he’s singing about. On this one, though, he leans more heavily than ever into being explicit about recovery, often bringing up the specters of drugs and alcohol as a no-exit escape. So he’s not just our chief counselor, at the moment, but maybe America’s Sponsor, too.
The opening track, the melodramatic and slightly gospel-choir-inflected “Winning Streak,” is set in an AA meeting, so you don’t jump into these themes much more readily than that. “When the Drugs Don’t Work,” a dreamy, mid-tempo duet with the hit songwriter Ilsey, doesn’t beat around the bush either, as the name indicates. Then there’s the synthy, jangly “Higher Than Heaven,” which is also tellingly titled and features rapper Wiz Khalifa contributing a sung verse about the dangers of getting stoned at the beginning of the day and staying that way. Starting a verse with the words “Wake up, bake up …” may not exactly be Kris Kristofferson singing “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” but for 2024, it’s close enough.
Jelly Roll’s commitment to these themes through almost the entirety of an album is admirable, and — given the pro-partying ethos that runs through most of contemporary country — actually kind of astonishing. When, at the beginning of the 12th song, he sings, “Ever been rock bottom? At the bottom of a bottle?,” your immediate response might be “Yes, during pretty much all of the preceding 11 songs.” Beginning with the 13th track, “Hey Mama,” a road-sick love song to his famous podcasting spouse, Bunnie XO, he starts touching on some lighter themes. But well before the album wraps up (at a hefty 22 songs for the standard version at 28 for the deluxe), he’s returned again and again to the core concepts — getting high, despising yourself and reaching out to God for help, in a nonsectarian way.
This can be a lot of life-and-death heaviness to absorb if you’re taking in the album in one fell swoop, especially its more concentratedly weighty early tracks. But the producers constantly reintroduce enough variances in the sound, which generally favors anthemic rock or mildly trappy pop, to keep the album from feeling like it’s stuck in a distressed mood. (The first half is pretty much split, production-wise, between country stalwart Zach Crowell and the pop teaming of the Monsters & Strangerz and Ryan Tedder, with Charlie Handsome and some others taking a greater role in the second half.) In other words, it sounds more ebullient than Jelly Roll’s surprisingly bracing lyrics sometimes are.
It’s not overstating the case to say that “Beautifully Broken” counts as a heartening piece of work, for those of us who have had some concern about how contemporary country has elevated the concept of drinking till you drop — as a lifestyle — into a practically uncontested, genre-wide religion. If there’s one genre you might need to nearly steer clear of as a person in recovery, it’s country. The genre and drinking have always had a complicated relationship, especially in the booze-soaked songs of the ’60s and ’70s, when Music Row tunesmiths would crank out one humorously fatalistic hit after another about how it was a close contest between alcohol and her memory for what’d kill you first. Embedded in those songs, at least, was the idea that alcoholism should not be an aspirational thing, even if the songwriters’ wicked wit did have a way of romanticizing it. What Jelly Roll is doing here now, I think, is reclaiming the idea of drowning sorrows being a bad thing… but dropping the cleverness of those old-school Nashville tunes to get to the heart of the matter.
So: hope you like therapy. There’s a lot of self-help actualization in “Beautifully Broken,” but I don’t mean to say that in rejecting the jokey side of singing about the down side of getting high, there’s no craft to it. A lot of good lines are scattered throughout the songs, starting with the first song’s second line: “I got two shaky hands, only one way to stop ’em.” Later on in that same opener, he sings, “A problem with a thousand more it’s causing / Damn, this shit’s exhausting,” an inexact rhyme I’d put up with just about any couplet I’ve heard this year. Occasionally he winds his way into a tongue-twister, as in “Unpretty,” which has the sweetest, most irresistible melody on the album, accompanied by maybe its unwieldiest thought: “I am nothing without my sins / I can’t pretend / I’m not unpretty.” Does that count as a double-negative, a triple-, or a quadruple-? Anyway, we get the idea.
This might all sound too preachy for country fans who prefer to keep their music and their psychotherapy separate… or maybe not quite preachy enough for anyone who would like Jelly Roll to be a perfect role model for recovery. In truth, he’s said he does attend AA meetings sometimes, just like the guy in the opening track — but unlike the guy in the song, he keeps his mouth shut, and is not abstinent, but believes moderation works for him, personally, as an apparently California-sober kind of guy. In the album’s peppiest song, “Get By” (the one chosen by ESPN as the official anthem for the 2024-25 college football season), he sings, “I might drink a little, I might smoke a lot… Show up Sunday morning looking like last night,” and there’s no indication he means this as a cautionary tale. So maybe he’s the sponsor who will tell you, for better or loose, that it’s OK to cut loose once after all.
But Jelly Roll’s core subject isn’t really substance use or abuse, although those mentions fuel a lot of the songs. More to the point, it feels like what he’s really going on about is shame. Which is also a subject that doesn’t turn up in the post-bro world of country, where machismo remains at a pretty unfiltered premium. On one occasion, deep into the deluxe version of the album, in “Past Yesterday,” a duet and co-write with Skylar Gray, he deals with it in a character-driven way, telling the story of a young woman trying to change her self-image in the wake of having grown up being molested by a neighbor. That may be a useful song for many listeners, but just as striking is how much Jelly Roll invites the men in his audience to deal with a sense of self-loathing — and why that might require something deeper than self-medication. “The broken man in the mirror can’t look at me ’cause he’s guilty / And I swear that the last couple months that motherfucker tried to kill me,” he sings. And: “I’m haunted by the lies of every time I said I’d change… The lights are shining on me but there ain’t nobody home.” And: “Some days I swear I’m better off layin’ in the dirt.” There’s a lot of veneer laid over the entire album that makes words like those feel palatable, but underneath it is a guy who’s done some work, and not just on his production values.
It’s sobering stuff … even if there’ll be no shortage of fans getting plastered to it when he brings his arena tour to their towns. One day and one contradiction at a time, right?
