Jelly Roll is, by some measures, the biggest thing happening in country music right now. And he’s not looking to coast through 2024 — new music is very much on the way. Although he performed “Halfway to Hell,” a song from his 2023 breakout album, on the CMT Awards, the singer said we can expect to see him debuting previously unheard material very shortly.
“This is it, man,” he said backstage after the show. “This is the end of the ‘Whitsitt Chapel’ era. We started it here a year ago with ‘Need a Favor’” — the 2023 CMT Awards performance that blew him into the stratosphere — “and we performed ‘Halfway to Hell’ tonight. I kind of started and ended an era of my music career right here. And then, next time y’all see me in an awards show, God willing, it will be so new.
“I wrote probably a hundred-and-something songs last year,” he continued. “I’m sitting on a phone that is shaking out of my pocket with the spirit and soul in it that needs to be released. I’m to the point where I’m finna just start releasing music, just doing it. I need to get it out of me. It’s therapeutic for me. …I’ve never been more inspired. I’ve never been more aware of the people I’m representing and what I’m here to do and what my purpose is.”
How soon would he say the next era starts, then, publicly? “I’ve got an idea,” he answered. “I’d say here in about a month or two. Look at the calendar. You’ll see it. It’ll jump out at you in a minute. You’ll be like, ‘Ah, OK, that makes sense.’ That’s what I’m hoping for. I haven’t got the green light, but I know what moon I’m shooting for, baby. What I’ve learned in this process is, don’t be afraid to tell ’em what you want. Just shoot for it.”
Jelly Roll was putting our powers of deduction to the test with that invitation to examine the calendar. It doesn’t take too much brainpower to notice that the ACM Awards are just over a month away, on May 16. That would seem to be what he was hinting at for a time frame for premiering a new song. (He has yet another big performance scheduled in the meantime, at the 2024 iHeartCountry Festival on May 4, but since that show is primarily destined to go out over broadcast radio, it’s unlikely he’d schedule a major premiere there.)
The CMTs will always hold a special place in his heart, as a kind of before-and-after demarcation point in his career, because of last year’s galvanizing turn for him. “I’d only been out a few months at that point, the album was on its way, and that song (‘Need a Favor’) was probably in the late 30s on country radio at the time. So it was kind of what pushed that song over the edge. … This is always gonna be special to me because it was the first award show I ever performed at, the first award show I ever won an award at, and it’s a fan-voted award show, which makes the playing field a little different.”
But he just recently triumphed at another awards show that meant something, the People’s Choice Awards, with two fan-voted trophies there. “I didn’t go there thinking I was gonna win anything. And then when they were like, Best New Country (artist) award, I was like, ‘That’s awesome! I got it.’ And then when they (gave him the) Best New Pop award, I was like, ‘Somebody’s mad, for sure.’”
Jelly Roll merited an item on TMZ for the way he partied after winning those two People’s Choice Awards — by doing a little streaking on his hotel floor. (This was posted and then quickly deleted on social media by his wife, the site reported.) Should his current choice of lodging get a warning? “We’re sending that in the advance (to hotels) now, that every now and then, Jelly over-celebrates,” he laughed. “I tell you what, though, man, if you’d come from where I come from and you win two awards on national TV, you’d act a little crazy too.”
Time will tell whether he can keep the same track record going at industry-voted shows, but fan-voted honors seem to be a shoo-in for him right now. “The Jelly Roll fans are the mighty 300 Sparta. I tell ’em I may not ever be one of the biggest artists in country, but man, I will always have a fan base that will scream because they have been quiet for so long and they’ve been shit on for so long. … I think that people understand that I represent a group of people that aren’t properly represented, and when I win, we win. It’s like a win for a whole bunch of kind of misfit people, you know what I mean? I’m a straight-up misfit dude. I’m as white trash as I look like I am. I am who I am all the time. What you see here is what you see at a dinner table.”