Jelly Roll Is an Endearing Mess on ‘Beautifully Broken’
Just a few hours after dropping his already jam-packed 22-track album Beautifully Broken, Jelly Roll issued an extended version featuring five additional songs, each with special guests like Halsey and Keith Urban. They’re perfectly fine bonus tracks that show off Jelly’s gift for collaboration — “just cause I ain’t reaching for the bottle… don’t mean I don’t want to,” he sings with Keith Urban, finding common ground in “Don’t Want To” — but they’re also completely unnecessary. The Nashville star born Jason DeFord is at his best when he’s on his own, spelunking deep into the caverns of his tortured soul like he did on his 2023 breakout, Whitsitt Chapel.
In an interview with RS, Jelly described Beautifully Broken as his exploration of mental health and addiction, and the rapper-turned-singer sets that tone deftly on the opening track “Winning Streak.” While the title may suggest his recent spate of professional victories — a pair of Grammy nominations, performing on Saturday Night Live and the Emmys, a headlining tour of arenas — it’s actually a reminder that winning is born from losing. “Hello, my name is Jason,” he recites during one key moment in the song, transporting the listener to a folding chair in a church-basement AA meeting. “Nobody walks through these doors on a winning streak,” Jelly tells us in the chorus.
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Embracing one’s failings, not pushing them away, is part of the Jelly Roll story and he leans hard into that narrative throughout Beautifully Broken. “Unpretty” is an organ and choir ballad in which he acknowledges all the wrong moves and misdeeds that he overcame to arrive at his current peak. “The man I was was wrong/but he’s the one who built me,” he sings, before going on to kill his ego with one of the most vulnerable lines of any country album this year: “I hate the man I used to be/but he’ll always be a part of me.”
“Get By,” meanwhile, with its opening “9 to 5” chord structure and click-clack rhythm, is Jelly sharing his secret to seeing another day. It’s not as straight-and-narrow as you may think: “I might drink a little/I might smoke a lot,” he admits, “show up Sunday morning looking just like last night/that’s how I get by.” In other words, he still has his vices and crutches, and they’re right out in the open (Not completely sober, Jelly has said he sings “Winning Streak” as a character).
That honesty is remarkable in a genre where maintaining a squeaky clean images and staying politically neutral is the norm. But it’s precisely why Jelly Roll has become such a hero to his audience: He is the tattooed face looking back at them in the mirror. Listen to the weed rap “Higher Than Heaven” with Wiz Khalifa, one of a few collabs on the original version of Beautifully Broken. Jelly proudly says he’s going to smoke away his problems, even if, he notes, “it ain’t gonna solve ‘em.”
But his real solution to what’s ailing him lies in the bond with his wife, the equally charismatic Bunnie Xo. He pays her due tribute in “Hey Mama,” a gentle coffeeshop ballad that boasts one of Jelly’s best vocals as a singer. Like with the other highlights on Beautifully Broken, it succeeds because he’s singing about what he knows firsthand. In this case, a good woman; in others, a flawed man.
Jelly returns to that truth one last time in the closing track “What’s Wrong With Me”: “It took a real long time for me to see/But I’m alright with what’s wrong with me.” On Beautifully Broken, all those wrongs add up to one quite alright album.
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