Name: An Emotional Jelly Roll Says He Writes Music to Help People
Uploaded: 2023-05-17T18:19:31.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'An Emotional Jelly Roll Says He Writes Music to Help People' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-05-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'An Emotional Jelly Roll Says He Writes Music to Help People' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-05-17. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience
Can I tell you this story? It's a bit of a story, but it's fun to tell.
So I had wrote like a hundred songs last year, and I didn't feel great about
any of them to be honest.
The label liked a few and was trying to pick radio singles, but I just didn't
have no conviction about it, Joe.
And my daughter at the same time had found her way into this little back road
church in the middle of nowhere about a country where we live.
She kept asking me to come and, you know, I have a tumulus relationship with
the Lord.
So I wasn't, you know, sure how I'd show up, but I was like, you know what, I'll
go.
And I went, there was a hundred people, a back road church, you know, 20 of
them were kids went to high school with her.
And around the same time, I caught this little motherfucker smoking pot, right?
She's 15. She's doing 15 year old kid stuff. And I was like, Betty, you won't
believe it.
About your age, I started making these same decisions and I was going to this
little bitty church in Antioch.
I tell her the story of this church. She don't believe it.
So I take her to this old church. It's still there. It's called Whitsitt Chapel
Baptist Church.
And that night riding home with her, I didn't tell nobody, but in my mind, I
thought that's the album I'm writing.
Like, fuck every song I wrote, I'm writing this album.
I called Zach Crowell. He produced every Sam Hunt song ever.
You know, one of the biggest producers in town I've known in my whole life. He's
here with me right now.
And I said, dude, I want to write an album called Going to Church.
And I just kind of want to write this kind of journey and just kind of A to Z
it and write a real project.
And Zach was like, I'm in. He's like, well, why don't you just call it Whitsitt
Chapel?
So that's how we ended up doing Whitsitt Chapel.
So when Need a Favor came into the fold, I was like, what's worship music for
sinners sound like?
Like, what is a motherfucker like me? You know, because, you know, when you're
in church, it's holy, holy, you are great.
I was like, I don't necessarily feel that way. So how do I feel? You know what
I mean?
And then it was like, only talk to God when I need a favor.
You know, and I was like, we got to build it with a choir and big production.
I want that old stomp clap, you know, that old church feel.
And I want to bring like that vibe of that church, you know, into the into that.
And the whole thing is the whole album is built on that vibe of like there's
fire and brimstone.
There's everything you go through in a Sunday morning worship service.
Have you ever been to a Sunday in the South worship service?
They're going to you're going to convince you you're a horrible human at some
point.
At some point you're going to hell. And then at the end, they'll hit a major
key instead of a minor one finally and go, but there's hope.
You know what I'm saying? So I was like, how do I write that? You know?
Well, I've always been a fan of those preachers.
I love the way they captivate an audience, even if they're crazy, even if they're
talking nonsense.
No, there's something exciting about watching some dude preach the word and
just yell it out on fire.
So I got a I got I'm going to send you a link to the album, but I got a
preacher throughout the whole album doing that.
Joe tied the record together.
Oh, so you read like the album starts with this dude like in by the grace of
God, we were saved.
And it just drops the first song. It's cool, man.
That's amazing. I got nerdy, dude. I went like old school.
I went like back to the 90s. I was in the studio like we were just getting high
and coming up with shit.
Beautiful. Yeah, it was so much fun. It's probably the most fun I've ever had
writing an album because it's the first time I've sat down a long time and
wrote an album instead of just writing a bunch of songs and then picking an
album.
You know what I mean? I was like, no, I'm right. We're going to sit down and
write an album.
So that just came out of the blue inspirationally.
Yeah, just I just wasn't just felt like something to do and I'm going to get
like all the way real.
I didn't understand what was I had commercial success for the first time in my
life and I didn't know how to deal with that.
So you do what everybody does in that moment. I'm sure you may or may not have
been there in your career early where you like you chase it then.
You're like, oh my God. Hold on. I can be. Yeah.
And I realized that the songs wouldn't sound like Jelly Roll no more, you know,
and I was like, no, I'm doing the thing that people do where they fuck their
career up.
I was like, I'm not doing that, man. So you think that that's just a normal
trap that happens to everybody that gets success and they don't want to fuck up
that success.
So they try to make a formula for what they think that people liked about their
early shit.
Yes, yes. One hundred percent or they chase whatever the poppy record was or
whatever the record that did the most.
So it's like, how do I write another song like that? So I was coming off of a
hit that I the one I gave you the plaque for son of a sinner was my first radio
hit like hit hit.
And I was like, I didn't know how to come out of it because I didn't write the
song for radio. I wrote the song like I wrote every other song.
But then you start thinking, oh, I can write songs for radio. I had fucking 70
radio songs like fuck. I'm not. You know, it's like, no, man, I just need to.
I need to do what got me to radio. I need to do what Jelly Roll does. And I was
like, I know what it is.
I'm gonna get back in my foxhole and write me a fucking album, dude. You know
what I'm saying?
That's beautiful. I took it off Music Row. We went back to some little old back
ass studio in the backwoods.
And we wrote it kind of like, you know, like we wrote all my early shit.
I feel like it's like every level of success that you get, you're presented
with a unique problem that you haven't seen before.
And it's up to you to just figure it out. Just figure it out. What are you
doing this for?
And I think that applies to everything. I know it applies to comedy. It
definitely seems to apply to music.
I think it probably applies to everything. Figure out what you're doing it for.
Like what? Why do you like to do? I know you have to make a living.
But once all that's taken care of, like, what are you doing it for?
You should be doing it for the love of this thing, whatever this thing is that
you do.
You are a love spreading machine as a human being, whether it's your love of
carpentry, whether it's your love of electronics.
What is it? What's your thing, man? Everybody's got a thing, but not everybody
finds a fucking thing.
That's the problem with this world. Some people get trapped in something that's
not their thing, and that's what they are now.
And they don't ever get to express themselves in a way that would make them
feel good.
Well, for me, I always call it the why. And it's like what you said, even with
the music. And that's what happened with those 70 songs.
When the why comes down to all this is catchy or this is a good song. I'm past
the point of like if this I want to help people, Joe, like my music has always
been therapeutic.
My music has always been for people. What got me into music was my mother.
So my mother was a woman who struggled with extreme mental health issues and
drug addiction, and she would never come out of a room, Joe.
And she would come downstairs and she'd throw a record on, and she'd light a
cigarette at the table.
And dude, I would watch the house change, like brothers, sisters, cousins
coming from across the street.
We need a little tight neighborhood, poor people, you know, neighbors coming
over.
Her friends start flooding the house, and she held court.
Joe, I would watch our kitchen turn into a nightclub, and she'd start telling
stories.
And listen, we didn't have Google. We had to believe the bitch back then, right?
You know what I'm saying?
You know what I'm saying? So she would be like, James Taylor wrote this about
his drug-addicted mother.
You know what I'm saying? Or something, and play Fire and Rain.
Or she'd be like, Bette Midler wrote The Rose about, and we're just like all
captivated.
And then she'd play The Rose, and we're all crying in the kitchen together. And
it's like, and I didn't understand, because I'm a kid, right?
But something changed in her when the record went on, is how I looked at it.
I didn't know anything about drug addiction, anything about schizophrenia, or
bipolar, or any of this stuff she was dealing with, or manic depression back
then, what they called it.
I didn't know any of this. I just knew that this lady never fucking leaves that
room, and when she does, it seems like the music doesn't.
So I spent my whole life writing songs for her, right?
I was like, I kind of indirectly was like writing these songs for the addicted
and the broken. You know what I mean? Because that's what I was seeing.
Yeah.
So it's like, I found purpose in the music. And like I tell people, if I was
going to do it for money, like any sane fucking comedian or musician, I'd have
quit 10 years ago.
Because fuck, I didn't make any for 15 years. You know, if I was doing it for
money, I'd have quit forever ago and went and got a job.
I just knew that it was always helping people. You know what I mean? It's like
the music was all, because I'd seen how it helped my mother.
And I knew the power of music. And to this day, like when you first bring up
music, I'm like, I'm a mood guy.
It's like, you know, you know how I feel about what I got to go listen to. Like,
to this day, if I'm going through something in life, I'll grab a joint, go hop
in the pickup truck and tell my wife I'll be back.
And she knows what I'm doing. I'm just going to go listen to music for an hour
and smoke a joint and I'm going to come back and sort through this shit.
But it was something about that that made me want to write songs for purpose.