“The broken glass of a bottle makes a jagged rock bottom,” sings the narrator in “Winning Streak,” the first song in the new album, “Beautifully Broken,” by alt-country/hip-hop artist Jason DeFord, performing under the name Jelly Roll. Both the lyric and the song set the tone for this remarkable album of introspection and humble transparency. DeFord has been open about his struggle with alcohol and drug addiction, as well as his youthful convictions for crimes related to those addictions. He broke into the mainstream in 2023 with “Whitsett Chapel,” his first commercially successful album, for and about “real people with real problems,” as DeFord described it. And he has used his newfound fame as a platform to advocate for addiction recovery programs, especially related to the opioid epidemic in the United States.
As a follow-up to “Whitsett Chapel,” “Beautifully Broken” is a sustained meditation on the vices related to addiction and the virtues necessary for recovery. Along the way, DeFord explores the difficulty of admitting that one has an addiction, as well as the external forces that make recovery so grueling. In this way, the album can be seen as an exposition on two key steps in the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous: admitting that one is “powerless over alcohol,” which makes one’s life “unmanageable”; and making a “searching and fearless oral inventory” of oneself.
“Beautifully Broken” will not appeal to everyone’s tastes or sensibilities. It contains raw, emotional lyrics, including language that will be offensive to some listeners. And DeFord is covered head to foot with hundreds of tattoos, which, as he writes in “Unpretty,” he wears like his scars, symbols of the pain he has been through and the difficulty of his recovery. But while expressed in gritty images and blunt language, “Beautifully Broken” has something to say to anyone, Catholic or otherwise, who struggles with addiction.
No escaping the past
DeFord writes with unflinching, raw honesty about the damage caused by addiction, always balanced by a message of hope for recovery. Self-reflection and memory are a necessary part of this process. The addict cannot afford to try to escape his past. Rather, he must incorporate that past into the present — one step at a time — so that every day is a reminder of the power of addiction and the fragility of recovery. “I hate the man I used to be,” the narrator intones in “Unpretty,” “But he’ll always be a part of me.” If we try to forget the mistakes and missteps that contributed to our addiction, we render ourselves vulnerable to making them again. “The man who I was was wrong/But he’s the one who built me,” continues “Unpretty.”
When I have written about my own recovery as an alcoholic, I have expressed agnosticism — even indifference — about the root causes of addiction generally and my condition specifically. This is not to say that the causes are unimportant. Indeed, the more we know about the mystery of addiction, the more help we can offer those who struggle with it. But for the drug or alcohol addict, these are secondary considerations to staying clean and sober this day, this minute, this second. One counselor early in my recovery liked to remind me to “play it forward” any time I am tempted to drink alcohol. This is a powerful tool in my recovery toolbox, but it is secondary to “rewinding the past.” Only by staying honest with myself about my past attempts to rationalize, excuse or dismiss my abuse of alcohol am I able to stay sober today.
Jason DeFord understands these things. But most importantly, he understands that his recovery is not possible without the grace of God, by which he has discovered meaning and purpose that cannot be found at the bottom of a glass. “When my devil meets your demons, we can find a little grace,” he writes in “Grace.” That is the grace that tells us both that “I am not okay … but it’s all gonna be alright.” For the addict, it will be “alright” only to the extent that we remain vigilant about how painful it was. As the brilliant singer/songwriter Jelly Roll, Jason DeFord is an unlikely source of the grace that helps to keep me sober. But that’s how God works. Grace is everywhere, even, sometimes, in the salty songs of a tattooed hip-hop/country drug addict. “Beautifully Broken” might be the catalyst for some of my readers, and Jelly Roll’s listeners, to make the first of their own twelve steps toward recovery.