The story of Jelly Roll is a lot of things — one of perseverance, one of long-time-coming success, and as he recently told the Los Angeles Times, not just simply “the story of a summer.”
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That’s why the rapper-turned-country star has spent his time carefully. When he’s not packing arena and amphitheater shows, he’s knocking on Eric Church‘s dressing room door to ask him a list of questions about the industry.
“Oh, I ear-fucked him,” Jelly Roll said in that interview. “It was probably three hours. But it’s the longevity he’s had that I’m fascinated with.”
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Church, for his part, thought they were just gonna “shoot the shit.” But Jelly Roll showed up with “an actual list of things he wanted to ask about.”
To that end, Jelly Roll — born Jason DeFord — feels a kinship with his contemporaries like Zach Bryan and Oliver Anthony. They’re fellow country singers who’ve endured a breakout year while also turning a certain kind of self-examination into major singer/songwriter success. Jelly calls them all “where-they-are-in-their-life-right-now songwriters,” and for his part, he’s dying to meet Bryan, a Navy veteran, in particular.
“I’ve just gotta hug him,” Jelly said. “As different as our stories are, they’re actually very similar. The military is not extremely different from jail in the aspect that you give away certain freedoms, and one of them is choosing who you’re around. He never got to pick his squad or platoon in the Navy, and I never got to pick my unit or my cellmate. So we just learned to love people.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Jelly also shares his fondness for breakout Mexican performer Peso Pluma, whose electrifying performance at the VMAs Jelly happened to catch. “I couldn’t understand what he was saying but I could feel the spirit of it. I was like, this dude’s raw,” Jelly said.
His tour also happened to roll through Atlanta shortly after Pluma did as well. “There was red, white and green confetti everywhere, and I was thinking, it’s way too early to do a Christmas show,” he said. “Then it hit me — the Mexican flag. That’s how high I was.”
Read the full profile here.
Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images
