Jelly Roll

October 5, 2023 at PDT

Wild Ones - Single

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June 24, 2020 at PDT

Save Me - Single

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July 25, 2024 at PDT

Lonely Road - Single

1 Trackfalse

June 11, 2024 at PDT

I Am Not Okay - Single

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March 12, 2020 at PDT

A Beautiful Disaster

Jelly Roll’s cameo on the Tech N9ne cut “EF U (Easier For You)” in 2019 couldn’t have arrived at a better time in the Nashville rapper’s career. Not only did the high-profile collaboration serve as proof that his star was on the rise, but it also led to a distribution deal with Tech’s Strange Music, an indie hip-hop institution whose commercial success has been profiled in publications like The Wall Street Journal. Strange Music wound up working on just two Jelly Roll albums, A Beautiful Disaster and Self Medicated, before he landed his first major-label contract. Yet both were critical successes that helped pave the way for the artist’s bold leap to country (albeit with a rock twist) in 2021. Make no mistake, the somber and spare A Beautiful Disaster is still a hip-hop set. The MC’s rhymes are responsible for the heavy lifting. But his growing confidence as a singer brings ballads like “Bottle and Mary Jane” and “Creature” to life.
The biggest changes heard on A Beautiful Disaster can be found in Jelly Roll’s emotional tenor. Had he recorded the gloomy “Nothing Left At All” several years earlier, he would have sounded far angrier with the demons that keep him up at night. Instead, he sits with them, trying to understand what they’re saying about his life. “Alone in thought, I stand and dwell,” he ponders. “I’m the go-to guy, so who do I go to when I need some help?” For Jelly Roll, the answer is increasingly family. On “Suicide,” arguably his most tender love song to date, the rapper speaks directly to his wife: “You’re the calm to my storm when I feel upset/You help every time that I feel depressed.” Even more telling is “Tears Could Talk,” a duet with his daughter, Bailee Ann, that uncovers their shared pain.
If it sounds as if Jelly Roll has gone emo, that’s not far off. Up to this point in his career, his music had been generally tagged as Southern hip-hop or, in the case of his Waylon & Willie collaborations with Struggle Jennings, country rap. But the wounded honesty, crawling tempos, and muted arrangements all over A Beautiful Disaster sympathize more with emo rap than Dirty South. There’s no bravado, and surely no swagger, only vulnerability.

12 Tracks

September 16, 2021 at PDT

Ballads of the Broken

10 Tracks

October 10, 2024 at PDT

Beautifully Broken (Pickin’ Up The Pieces)

Jelly Roll’s quick rise from obscure Nashville hip-hop artist to beloved country singer-songwriter is one of the genre’s more exciting success stories in recent memory. In just a couple years’ time, the Antioch, Tennessee-born and -raised artist, whose offstage name is Jason DeFord, has won major awards, including New Artist of the Year at the 2023 CMAs, a category that often serves as an industry coronation. During that period, he collaborated with a laundry list of stars from country music and beyond, including Lainey Wilson, Eminem, Post Malone, and Cody Johnson. It’s appropriate, then, that this follow-up to DeFord’s first proper country album, 2023’s wildly successful Whitsitt Chapel, would take an inspirational tone: A man with a checkered past that includes time in prison, Jelly Roll has never shied away from using his own story to motivate others.

Beautifully Broken opens with “Winning Streak,” a deeply vulnerable song about substance abuse and recovery, with gospel choir vocals backing up DeFord’s hopeful imperatives to “hold on.” He is similarly encouraging on “Everyone Bleeds,” a hip-hop-tinged reminder that money can’t buy immortality, and “Born Again,” a bluesy invocation of resilience that makes great use of his soulful side. Other highlights include single “I Am Not Okay,” a brooding plea for compassion in tough times, and closing track “What’s Wrong with Me,” a comparably bright and buoyant celebration of accepting one’s imperfections.

28 Tracks

April 20, 2017 at PDT

Addiction Kills

With each new release, the cult of Jelly Roll seemed to grow larger, and 2017’s Addiction Kills was no exception. In addition to notching three Gold-certified singles (“Wheels Fall Off,” “Hate Goes On,” and “Only”), the Nashville rapper undertook a 29-city support tour that became the most successful of his career at that point. He achieved all this with scant attention from the music press, mainstream or independent. To spread the word about his music, the always charismatic Jelly Roll took to social media, sharing not only music videos and live clips but also diary-like posts that run the gamut from somber reflections on incarceration to games of Jenga with his daughter, Bailee, and kayak trips with his wife, Bunnie XO (whom he had married in Las Vegas a year earlier).
As Addiction Kills proves time and time again, Jelly Roll’s gift for speaking from the heart isn’t a press-relations move; it represents the very core of his music (which matured by leaps and bounds in the late 2010s). When he raps, “My mind’s like a permanent reel that’s flipping pictures/Of friends that’s no longer with us,” on the title track, he’s both mourning losses in his own life and calling attention to the ravages of substance abuse upon the working-class youth packing clubs to see him. At the time of the record’s release in the spring of 2017, Tennessee was in the midst of its deadliest year to date for overdose deaths (three-fourths of which would be attributed to opioids). Fans were beginning to hear their own struggles in Jelly Roll’s unflinching storytelling. He acknowledges as much in the blues-influenced “Sex Drugs & Pain”: “I’m not a politician,” he lays out. “I’m a singer with words/That represents every kid that came up from the dirt.”
While the specter of death looms over Addiction Kills, Jelly Roll seeks solace in Bunnie, who helped ground him at a time when he was living out of a van most days. On the aforementioned “Wheels Fall Off” as well as the patiently thumping “Heaven,” he paints himself and her as a Bonnie and Clyde-style duo whose ride-or-die romance burns like a welding torch. On other songs, including “I’m Lit” and “Hot Streak,” he’s content to keep on living the fast life like an outlaw, an image Jelly Roll would further cultivate on the subsequent release Waylon & Willie, the first of several collaborations with country rapper Struggle Jennings.

12 Tracks

October 26, 2023 at PDT

Wild Ones - Single

2 Tracks

June 23, 2022 at PDT

Son Of The Dirty South (feat. Jelly Roll) - Single

1 Trackfalse

July 26, 2023 at PDT

Dragging These Roots - Single

1 Trackfalse

October 15, 2020 at PDT

Self Medicated

18 Tracks

August 1, 2024 at PDT

Liar - Single

1 Trackfalse

October 10, 2024 at PDT

Beautifully Broken

Jelly Roll’s quick rise from obscure Nashville hip-hop artist to beloved country singer-songwriter is one of the genre’s more exciting success stories in recent memory. In just a couple years’ time, the Antioch, Tennessee-born and -raised artist, whose offstage name is Jason DeFord, has won major awards, including New Artist of the Year at the 2023 CMAs, a category that often serves as an industry coronation. During that period, he collaborated with a laundry list of stars from country music and beyond, including Lainey Wilson, Eminem, Post Malone, and Cody Johnson. It’s appropriate, then, that this follow-up to DeFord’s first proper country album, 2023’s wildly successful Whitsitt Chapel, would take an inspirational tone: A man with a checkered past that includes time in prison, Jelly Roll has never shied away from using his own story to motivate others.

Beautifully Broken opens with “Winning Streak,” a deeply vulnerable song about substance abuse and recovery, with gospel choir vocals backing up DeFord’s hopeful imperatives to “hold on.” He is similarly encouraging on “Everyone Bleeds,” a hip-hop-tinged reminder that money can’t buy immortality, and “Born Again,” a bluesy invocation of resilience that makes great use of his soulful side. Other highlights include single “I Am Not Okay,” a brooding plea for compassion in tough times, and closing track “What’s Wrong with Me,” a comparably bright and buoyant celebration of accepting one’s imperfections.

22 Tracks

March 22, 2018 at PDT

Waylon & Willie 2

11 Tracks

November 2, 2017 at PDT

Waylon & Willie

11 Tracks

April 14, 2019 at PDT

Crosses and Crossroads

For an artist as restlessly creative as Jelly Roll, 2019 turned out to be a relatively quiet year for the blue-collar rapper from Nashville: He dropped just two albums, one of which, Whiskey Sessions II, had been recorded five years earlier. But what Jelly Roll lacked in quantity he more than made up for in quality with the aptly titled Crosses and Crossroads. This introspective, even spiritual effort finds Jelly Roll tempering the rollicking, country-fried hip-hop anthems that made him an underground hero with ballads shaped by his father’s battle with leukemia—which claimed his life mere weeks before the album’s release.
Penning the bulk of Crosses and Crossroads in the lobby of the hospital where his father spent the final months of his life, Jelly Roll delivers confessional lines that pierce the soul. On the record’s biggest hit, “Same A*****e,” he stares down mortality and family strife: “My father got leukemia, he just left critical care/Not to mention mama’s got dementia, man she’s always feeling sick.” Meanwhile, “Love the Heartless” feels like nothing less than a cry for salvation: “The storm that’s inside of me rages so violently/God shine your light on me, here I am.” On the latter, Jelly Roll swaps rapping for singing and experiments with the acoustic textures that will come to anchor his style on later releases, namely 2020’s Self Medicated and 2021’s Ballads Of The Broken.
But it isn’t just grief with which Jelly Roll grapples; it’s growth, too. Crosses and Crossroads is a document of transition, one that captures Jelly Roll—not just the artist, but the man and father as well—questioning old ways while simultaneously seeking out new ground upon which to stand tall. This is especially true of the country-rap ballad “Sunshine After the Rain.” Toggling between tensely delivered rhymes and a mournfully sung chorus, Jelly Roll can sense that life is indeed changing fast. “’Bout time I started thinking ’bout tomorrow/I’m growing up,” he admits. “Man, my family’s actually proud/I hear the thunder but I think I see a crack in the clouds.” Make no mistake, Jelly Roll has ventured deep into a dark night of the soul; and he’ll remain there for the rest of 2019 and well into 2020. But as these lines lay out, the rapper can sense the first rays of a new dawn.

7 Tracks

December 6, 2018 at PST

Goodnight Nashville

12 Tracks

August 23, 2021 at PDT

Sober - Single

1 Trackfalse

December 15, 2020 at PST

Waylon & Willie IV

10 Tracks

May 12, 2016 at PDT

Sobriety Sucks

15 Tracks

November 15, 2018 at PST

Waylon & Willie III

10 Tracks

August 22, 2024 at PDT

Get By - Single

1 Trackfalse

July 15, 2013 at PDT

No Filter

17 Tracks