American rapper, singer and songwriter Jelly Roll has for the first time opened up on his experience from attending alcoholics anonymous meetings.
According to him, it is an experience he has never spoken about before.
Speaking in an interview with the New York Times, the Nashville act who’s topped both the Mainstream Rock Airplay and Country Airplay charts talked about his ‘Winning Streak’ unreleased song.
The record off his upcoming ‘Beautifully Broken’ scheduled for release in Fall 2024 was inspired by alcoholics anonymous meetings according to Jelly.
“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?” he said.
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 completely sober, that I never want my stuff to get in the way of them”
The rapper further disclosed that he is actively doing better every day, describing a moment at an alcoholics anonymous meeting. He stressed that ‘Winning Streak’ tells another person’s story but in a first-person perspective.
“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.”
