Album Review – Jelly Roll’s “Beautifully Broken”

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Jelly Roll is America’s favorite feel good story, whether that story is true or not. People want to believe it, because it gives them hope, either in themselves, or in society at large, or both. It’s intoxicating. And so they indulge, kind of like a drug.

Jelly Roll is like a shake shack preacher, or a snake oil salesman, selling the public on the idea of sobriety while not working the 12 steps himself, and singing the praises of Christ’s straight and narrow path while deviating from it on a daily basis. His blustery sermons from the podiums of award shows, and his monologues on the morning talk show circuit using classic forms of persuasive rhetoric sell the public on what they’re looking to buy into, even if what is preached is not practiced.

On the day Jelly Roll released his new album Beautifully Broken all about getting sober and finding the righteous path, he also announced he’s opening a bar on Lower Broadway in Nashville. It’s the commercial exploitation of a false narrative that’s at the heart of the Jelly Roll experience.

Even beyond the popular music realm or the world of entertainment at large, people know who Jelly Roll is, and his tale of reformation, in large part because of his sermons and interviews, and the incessant parade of media puff pieces. Your mother and grandmother know about Jelly Roll. Your racist uncle loves his music, despite the face tattoos and otherwise slovenly nature. It’s how they convince themselves they’re not judgemental people.

Unquestionably, Jelly Roll has pulled himself up from his bootstraps, turned his life around, and ascended to the mountaintop of popular society through discipline, self-understanding, admitting to his past sins, and by submitting to the belief in a higher power. He’s recently lost 100 pounds. This is the benevolent aspect to the Jelly Roll story, and the part that deserves praise. Another other important aspect is how he inspires others to do the same with their lives, which has happened for many.

Jelly has gone from the gutter and dregs of society to become one of the most popular and applauded artists in all of music. It’s a distinctly American story, told through the twisting narrative of a rare and unlikely Nashville native. But part of the story of the hustle is that of the hustler, the street smart pusher telling people what they want to hear, while the truth of Jelly Roll is much more complex, and resides somewhere in between the assessment of his vocal supporters and his most vehement naysayers.

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Beautifully Broken isn’t a country album. This isn’t an opinion, or up for argument. It’s an empirically true statement based off of measurable signifyers and benchmarks indicative of country music that this album just doesn’t even come close to fulfilling, while it simultaneously fulfills the requisites for other genres much better. Even with a performer like Morgan Wallen who purists would consider exclusively pop, his music can still qualify by loose standards as a contemporary form of “country” music. Jelly Roll’s Beautifully Broken can’t even own that claim.

The album isn’t a hip-hop, rock, or pop album either really, though it certainly includes sounds more indicative of those genres than it does country. In truth, Jelly Roll’s Beautifully Broken is a contemporary Christian album, with a cohesive and continuous religious theme throughout, brought to life with contemporary pop, rock, and hip-hop sounds and treatments.

There perhaps has never been an album released in modern popular music that presents such a monoculture of lyrical content and themes as Beautifully Broken does. Virtually every single song in the droning 22-song track list works exactly the same in a cut and paste template of “I used to be a sinner, but I no longer am, and I now use God to get me through life.” It’s incredible how this album refuses to deviate or diversify itself from this central theme, slavishly pinned to this one single point like a diatribe.


This is an album of self-help affirmations and eye-rolling bromides that might be effective en masse upon a general population audience. But those who like to dig beneath the surface of music will find this whole exercise shallow, silly, and even uncool. Some of the songs and moments here are so sappy, they could populate a Disney soundtrack, while the volume of these moments works to undermine them all by exposing the boilerplate pattern behind the effort.

Meanwhile in a similar manner, the music is incredibly monotone when considering the exceptionally narrow window of sounds and influences it pulls from, with saccharine melodic choruses indicative of the pop world laid over electronic production and unimaginative, melodramatic tones that sound like everything else you hear in popular music. Beautifully Broken is a monogenre album of the highest order, but only if country was the least important requisite on the menu.

There are a few minor exceptions to the sameness that permeates the album stem to stern. The songs “Guilty” and “Woman” are more along the lines of conventional love songs, though they continue this theme of subservience and inferiority to something or somebody else. You have to wait until the 13th track called “Hey Mama” before hearing anything you could characterize as a contemporary-sounding country song. The intro/outro of “A Little Light” fits this characterization as well.

At least with Jelly Roll’s debut “country” album Whitsitt Chapel, there were performative efforts to make it somewhat fit into the country universe, and to deliver something a little different between each song. With Beautifully Broken, they think they’ve found the formula for what works for Jelly Roll, and don’t relent.

The average track from Jelly Roll’s Beautifully Broken has five songwriters. Multiple tracks have eight songwriters. There are so many cooks in the kitchen, no wonder the results are bland, and strangely dispassionate. Though many will give credit to this album for being “personal,” you can tell Music Row has picked up on how lucrative making a “Jelly Roll song” is, and everyone is churning them out. Expanding that approach to the 28-song instantly-released deluxe edition of the album called Pickin’ Up The Pieces draws this out even further.

None of this takes away from the fact that the overall message of Beautifully Broken isn’t a positive and important one. But perhaps it would have been better implemented in smaller doses, or within some more variety. There are no Bro-Country songs here, or terrible “hooking up in the club” tracks, which the audience should be thankful for. However, there is an inconsistency of message that undermines the work, and this parallels Jelly Roll’s highly-lauded personal life.

Starting with the opening song “Winning Streak,” Jelly Roll regularly makes references to sobriety, and specifically the 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program. But then at other times he seems to shirk the idea of sobriety. Sometimes these contradictions, or hypocrisy, come one after another.

On the 9th track of the album, “Get By,” Jelly Roll sings about how he might “drink a little” and “smoke a lot,” and then show up to church looking like the night before. Then the very next track “Unpretty,” Jelly Roll sings, “I was praying for change, how could only 12 steps feel so far away” in a song that’s very much about working the 12-step program. You could say these songs present an “arc” of going from working to sobriety to achieving it, but that’s not the case. This inconsistency remains throughout the record, and Jelly Roll’s personal life.

While media outlets, Christian organizations, and sobriety advocates parade Jelly Roll as a hero and praise the message of Beautifully Broken, he openly admits that he still drinks, smokes, and perhaps does other stuff, while the murmurs out of Nashville are of wild parties, daily drug use, and unruly entourages surrounding Jelly Roll, painting a different pictures from the puff pieces the media publishes, and the sermons he delivers at awards shows. And listening to the music, in many respects these rumors and accounts are affirmed.

Jelly Roll is not a country music artist, he’s not the sober hero he’s been made out to be, and he’s a flawed Christian at best. And all of that’s okay. You don’t have to be completely sober and a Christian to be a good person, and you don’t have to be country to be a good music performer. But the marketing, the image, and the hype have gotten way ahead of the reality with Jelly Roll.

For some, Jelly Roll might be Beautifully Broken. But for others, the facade is cracked and beginning to crumble from leaning too heavily into a flawed message, and a false narrative. Either you’re committed to the program and country music, or you’re not. Jelly Roll is not.

4/10





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