Long before his country music breakthrough in recent years, Tennessee native Jelly Roll was in an admittedly bad place in his life. He was arrested several times in his teenage years and early 20s and spent some time in prison for charges including aggravated robbery.
When looking back on the person that he once was in a new interview on the On Purpose With Jay Shetty podcast, Jelly Roll thought of the people he robbed more than two decades ago and the hurt he caused them. Now, he only wishes to speak to them and offer his sincerest apologies.
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"I really want to have a conversation with them. I’ve thought about reaching out," he said. "This has been 24 years ago now. I just don’t know how that would even start, or, you know, how I would go about it because sometimes I wonder if they might have even seen me in passing or are aware of my success. I wonder if they’ve even correlated. I mean, I’ve obviously dramatically changed. I was 15, dude, you know what I mean? [...] I still had my high voice when I did that robbery. So, I’ve thought about that a ton and they’re definitely on my list."
"I had no business taking from anybody," he continued. "Just the entitlement that I had, that the world owed me enough that I could come take your stuff. It’s just what a horrible, horrible way to look at life and people. What a horrible way to interact with the Earth."
The hit-making artist has done a complete 180 with his life in the years since then. He's strived to make a positive impact in other ways, including performances at correctional facilities. He only hopes that he can show that to his onetime victims and take accountability for what he did in his past.
"I hope that they would see that I’ve made it my life’s mission to change and to change people because that’s what I’m representing the most in what I do," he said. "I think people cheer for me because they see a little bit of me in them, or they see their cousin—I’m a family member, they relate, and I speak for an unspoken group of people, and I hope they would know that."
"I’m trying to diligently prove myself that I’ve not only changed but also I took the platform serious and that it’s making me change more every day," he added. "I hope they would forgive me."
It goes without saying that Jelly Roll doesn't view those younger years with pride. "I look back at those years, and I’m so embarrassed to talk about them," he said. "I was a really horrible kid all the way into my mid-twenties. People are always like, 'You’re the nicest dude I’ve ever met.' I’m like, 'I’m so glad y’all haven’t met nobody that knew me 20 years ago.'"
"I took zero accountability for anything in my life," he went on. "I was the kid that if you asked what happened, I immediately started with everything but me. And it took years for me to break that, like years of work, solid work to just like break that. It also has taken years of work for me to even forgive that kid."
Today, Jelly Roll's focus is on his career and bettering himself in every way going forward. His latest album Beautifully Broken dropped Oct. 11 and he's criss-crossing the country this fall on his Beautifully Broken Tour.
