Jelly Roll: Music has helped me through the darkest times
Jelly Roll has always turned to music in the "darkest moments" of his life and explains how songwriting has been his "constant" throughout all his struggles.
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."
