Jelly Roll has a Top 10 hit with “Liar,” from his latest Beautifully Broken album, released in October. Jelly Roll wrote the song, which he first performed at the 2024 ACM Awards, with Ben Johnson, Ashley Gorley and Taylor Phillips. Now a definite hit, the Nashville native admits he almost didn’t release the song.

“I felt like it was important to start the new era of music at the ACMs because we had done ‘Save Me’ there,” Jelly Roll tells Taste of Country, explaining his decision to make that stage the song’s debut. “We launched me and Lainey [Wilson] there. I think that as we’re celebrating ‘Halfway to Hell’ going No. 1, it’s kind of the end of the Whitsitt Chapel era.”

The video for “Liar” shows Jelly Roll facing his biggest enemy over the years: himself. The song, and video, show his redemptive journey, and how we went from being in and out of prison to a country music superstar.

“Liar” says in part, “Saying, ‘Drink another whiskey / Pop another pill / Money makes you happy / Heaven isn’t real / You won’t find nobody to love / Because your heart’s too broke’ / Now I know / You ain’t nothin’ but a liar / Yeah, I walk right out the fire / Yeah, you try to keep me down / Try to put me underground / But I’m only going higher.” It’s a message that Jelly Roll first had to ingrain in himself, after spending so many years believing he would never amount to anything.

“It’s deep-rooted insecurities early. I was always a bigger kid. So I had a little chip on my shoulder naturally as a young kid,” Jelly Roll explains on the On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast (via People). It was, unfortunately, on the streets where he found acceptance as a child, and began an unfortunate life of crime, one he now deeply regrets.

“No matter how old I was, I had no business taking from anybody,” Jelly Roll acknowledges. “Just this entitlement that I had that the world owed me enough that I could come take your stuff. What a horrible, horrible way to look at life and people, just what a horrible way to interact with the earth.”

Jelly Roll was charged with a felony when he was just 16 years old. For most people, that would be the end of their ambitions. But for Jelly Roll, it’s a reminder of how far he has come since the young man, in and out of prison.

“It’s a dream killer. It’s the automatic dream killer,” Jelly Roll says on Q With Tom Power, sharing what having a felony conviction did for him and his self-esteem. “My felony happened to me when I was 16, which is two years before you’re an adult, and they charged me as an adult in that moment. So even then, I wish I had really the brain to understand what my lawyer was trying to explain to me when he was saying, ‘Hey man, in the state of Tennessee, when you get one of these, you can never get it off your record. You can never get it expunged. It’s on your record forever.”

Jelly Roll is still impacted by the felony that remains on his record, but he is more focused on the future than his past. The 40-year-old has big goals for the future, including becoming a healthier version of himself, after already losing more than 100 pounds.

“I want to be on the cover of Men’s Health by March of 2026,” Jelly Roll says on his wife Bunnie XO’s Dumb Blonde podcast (via American Songwriter). “That’s my new goal. I want to have one of the biggest transformations.”

Find all of Jelly Roll’s music and upcoming shows at JellyRoll615.com.