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Jelly Roll’s ‘Beautifully Broken’ Offers Country Music a Reset, by Aggressively Prioritizing Mental Health > Partying: Album Review
Jelly Roll wraps themes of addiction, recovery and self-image in a blanket of inspirational pop-country, but the core realness is surprisingly bracing.
And so, when the singer turned up on the Emmys performing his latest single, “I Am Not Okay,” during the “In Memoriam” segment, a lot of coastal viewers were surely processing things in real time, wondering aloud: Who is this heavily tatted, almost literally larger-than-life figure, and is his gritty ballad about depression and anxiety really the right way to send off Bob Newhart, Peter Marshall, et al.? On one occasion, deep into the deluxe version of the album, in “Past Yesterday,” a duet and co-write with Skylar Gray, he deals with it in a character-driven way, telling the story of a young woman trying to change her self-image in the wake of having grown up being molested by a neighbor. And: “I’m haunted by the lies of every time I said I’d change… The lights are shining on me but there ain’t nobody home.” And: “Some days I swear I’m better off layin’ in the dirt.” There’s a lot of veneer laid over the entire album that makes words like those feel palatable, but underneath it is a guy who’s done some work, and not just his production values.
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