Jelly Roll has always turned to music in the “darkest moments” of his life.
The 38-year-old rapper – who 10 years spent in federal prison from the age of 14 to 25 for various charges – explained that songwriting has been his “constant” in life and wants to add “hopefulness” to his latest record ‘Whitsitt Chapel’.
He told ‘Entertainment Tonight’: “I think at some point in life, everything in life has let me down. But music was always my constant. Like, when I had nothing else, I had a boombox. When I was incarcerated, I had a set of headphones and a little radio. In the darkest moments of my life, at my father’s funeral, it was music that helped me cope. Music was always there to give me a hug. So I just want to do that for people. I’m constantly writing songs to show people that it’s okay to be a work in progress. It’s okay to still meet yourself in the middle. But I also wanted to make sure this time that I added hopefulness to it and the tempo. I had some tempo changes. I wanted to be more uplifting, more major keys.”
The ‘Save Me’ hitmaker – whose real name is Jason Bradley DeFord – went on to add that he had had an encounter with a fan from his hometown who cited him as an inspiration and insisted that even “billions of dollars” could never match that.
He said: “There’s no amount of celebrity or money that will ever mean more than the lady I just saw in the parking lot that’s from Antioch, Tennessee, and asking if she takes a picture and just told me her brief piece of her story and what she’s overcome in life and how I inspired that. You could throw billions of dollars at me, it’ll never have the effect that I get, that feeling, when fans tell me the music helped them.”