Jelly Roll is speaking candidly about his experience attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings, a topic he says he’s never talked about in public before.
In a new interview with The New York Times, the artist — who’s topped both the Mainstream Rock Airplay and Country Airplay charts — was asked about an unreleased song, “Winning Streak,” which will be heard on upcoming album Beautifully Broken, scheduled for release in fall 2024. “Winning Streak” “basically describes going to an AA meeting,” NYT‘s David Marchese noted in the conversation. “Is alcohol addiction something you struggle with or have struggled with?”
Jelly Roll explained the song was written “from the perspective of a story I’d seen happen for real” at an AA meeting, which he’ll attend “for my demons.”
“I still will have a cocktail every now and then and I’m a known weed smoker, but I got away from the drugs that I knew were gonna kill me,” Jelly Roll said of his relationship with drugs and alcohol in the podcast interview published on Saturday (Aug. 17).
He continued, “It was really hard for me to get away from those drugs,” which he’s previously said included substances including cocaine, pain pills and codeine. “Something I do [for] maintaining my relationship with those drugs is I will still attend the meetings, even though I’m not a textbook sober guy — but I never share, I just quietly sit and appreciate the message and the meaning.”
Added Jelly Roll, “This is the first time I’ve talked about this publicly at all. I don’t tell people I go to meetings. It’s not a part of my story that I share because I have so much respect for the men and women in that program that get actually completely sober, that I never want my stuff to get in the way of them.”
Jelly Roll, who says in the chat that he’s “actively doing better every single day,” described the moment at an AA meeting that influenced his writing on “Winning Streak.” It tells someone else’s story, but in the first-person perspective.
He said that felt right for this particular track, and named first-person songs like James Taylor’s “Carolina in My Mind” that have inspired him and made him emotional, solely as the listener.
“This kid, he’s going through it,” he said of the meeting that resulted in writing “Winning Streak.” “One of the old men sitting there was like, ‘Look man, it’s all good. Nobody came in here on a winning streak.’ It was such a beautiful thing. If you’ve ever been to an AA meeting, a big one, like this room had 20, 30 people in it, it felt like …. You watch the room kind of split when he said that ‘cause half of the room are old, sober dudes who remember being the young dude, so they chuckle, and the other half are other dudes who just immediately feel it in their bones and cry. But it’s all the same emotion and feeling, and right then, there it was. That was the beginning of ‘Winning Streak.’”
“Get By,” another new song from his upcoming album, will serve as the soundtrack for ESPN’s season-long college football coverage across ESPN networks and ABC. Jelly Roll, who’s latest new music release is the collab “Losers” on Post Malone’s F-1 Trillion album, will hit the road for a series of headlining tour dates later this month.
Listen to his full interview, clocking in at over a half-hour, with The New York Times below.