(BBR/BMG/Republic/UMG)
As the gravel-voiced singer achieves mainstream success, his music is moving further from his back-country roots – but the grit in his lyrics lifts it above standard pop fare

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.