Jelly Roll’s inspiring words aren’t confined to his songs. Though he’s become a superstar in recent years thanks to the cross-over success of his song “Son of a Sinner“—which marked his debut country single and first No. 1 hit on country radio—Jelly Roll has long been sharing his hard-fought lessons through his art.
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Born and raised in Nashville, the rapper and singer had a rough adolescence where he was in and out of jail for drug use. But those challenging experiences, coupled with his will to overcome them, have made him both an inspiring artist and human. Check out some of his best quotes below.
[RELATED: 4 Inspiring Moments from the ‘Jelly Roll: Save Me’ Documentary]
1. “I’ve just always been hyper-focused on the feeling of music.”
2. “I walk in that room and all of a sudden I just feel the need to express this pain that I’ve experienced in life.”
3. “I never lived in the present because I was so haunted by the past, and I think I’m finally starting to let my past go enough that I can actually be present.”
4. “I want to help people…My music has always been therapeutic. My music has always been for people.”
5. “So I just want to encourage you all to look at the gift that you think has been a curse and how that applies to something in your life.”
6. “I came out of jail with a plan A and plan B. Plan A was I was going to come home and I was going to put every piece of energy I had in music…I came home and bet the farm on plan A.”
7. “I spent a lot of years destroying, I want to spend a lot of future years building.”
8. “They let a loser win tonight…This is for the underdogs. This is for the losers and the have-nots. God takes the impossible and makes it look small.”
9. “I don’t think any one person has got the ability to change the world. But I think that if a bunch of people do a little bit, it gets a little bit better.”
10. “How much more true does it get than sitting inside of a Baptist church I got baptized in 20-something years ago, I’ve since done nothing but go to prison, do a bunch of people wrong, make a lot of mistakes in life, turn it around, go on to be a fucking multi-millionaire, help as many people as I possibly can. It’s the fucking wildest story ever, to me.”
Photo by Astrida Valigorsky/Getty Images
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