Country

Life is psychologically challenging in 2024.
The planet gets hotter by the month, the technology that was supposed to improve lives stalls or breaks down, artificial intelligence poses a threat to future employment and there’s a chance democracy could crumble before the United States turns 250. It’s no wonder that one in six American adults are currently battling depression, according to a 2023 Gallup poll. That figure is even higher among women, minorities and people younger than 45.

It’s almost as if the marketplace had been primed for Jelly Roll. His country singles thus far – “Son of a Sinner,” “Need a Favor,” “Halfway to Hell” and the Lainey Wilson collaboration “Save Me” – have captured souls in battles with darkness. He extends that string with “I Am Not Okay,” released by Stoney Creek to country radio via PlayMPE on June 11.

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It’s “real music for real people with real problems,” Jelly Roll says. “That struggle is something that a lot of my music touches on. It’s something I am honest about with my own life and something that’s for anyone who is going through that.”

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“I Am Not Okay” reflects both real-life anxieties and the audacity of optimism. Songwriters Ashley Gorley (“Bulletproof,” “I Had Some Help”) and Casey Brown (“Blue Tacoma,” “Girl In Mine”) booked flights to meet Jelly Roll and fellow writer Taylor Phillips (“Hurricane,” “World On Fire”) on tour in North Carolina last fall, but a series of airline issues delayed their commute by eight hours and took them to a different airport. They rented a car in Charlotte and drove four more hours.

Despite their frustrations, the group composed two or three songs prior to the Oct. 5 show in Wilmington, a concert that proved particularly inspirational.

“I found myself multiple times during the show kind of looking at the crowd to see the reaction of these people that were soaking in this music,” Phillips remembers. “And as you look amongst this crowd, you see people crying, you see people rejoicing, and you see people putting their hands in the air.”

Later, as the bus rolled out for Greensboro, Phillips told Jelly Roll the concert was like going to church. The singer noted that he was essentially making it “okay for people to not be okay.” That corresponded with a title Gorley had logged in his phone, “I Am Not Okay,” and he sat down at a piano, singing the title as a melody and progression began to unfold. He created a cautiously ascendant bassline, with the piece moving instinctively from darker chords into brighter triads.

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“I started all the phrases with the six-minor chord, but then I always ended up on a major chord,” Gorley says. “Not that I was thinking about that. If I was smart, I’d be like, ‘Oh, I did it on purpose.’ But it just sounded like that.”

Gorley was psyched to explore the topic – he’d gone on the trip hoping they could write something that would bring attention to depression, a topic that’s important to him and to Phillips, who lost a friend, Brian Kindle, to suicide on Christmas Eve in 2020. (Phillips now does an annual benefit in Kindle’s honor). The issue resonates with people in every walk of life.

“Everybody has to go through something,” Phillips says, “whether you have a billion dollars in your bank account, or if you got zero dollars in your bank account.”

The “I Am Not Okay” text emerged in linear fashion, each line building on the previous one. Additionally, the song’s individual sections gave a big-picture view of the protagonist’s battle. He starts in verse one mired in total depression. The chorus acknowledges the issue’s prevalence – “I know I can’t be the only one” – and ultimately settles into a quiet confidence: “I’m not okay/ But it’s all gonna be alright.”

Verse two has the character vacillating between progress and backsliding, confessing that some days he can barely get out of bed.

“I’ve been blessed beyond belief,” Gorley says, relating the message to his own life, “But some days, I’m still like, ‘Oh, shoot, this is gonna be rough.’ You know, I lay there, and everybody in the room feels the same. Anybody around the world feels the same, if we’re honest about it.”

By the time “Not Okay” hits the bridge, the singer envisions an afterlife when the struggle is over. It gives some motivation to keep improving, though it’s unclear if the protagonist will ever crawl out of the emotional hole completely.

“If you put too much of a bow on it, it doesn’t feel like an authentic Jelly song,” Brown says. “There’s a really cool thing that all of his songs do, where it kind of meets you in the middle of hurting, and sits there with you and encourages you in a way that doesn’t feel forced. I think he’s a really unique voice that can kind of approach songs from that way.”

Gorley had to leave early the next morning for a family commitment, so he laid down a piano track and sang a rough vocal for the demo. Brown got Jelly Roll to redo the vocal the next day, but left it in that simple form for producer Zach Crowell (Sam Hunt, Dustin Lynch).

“I didn’t really want to do a ton to it,” Brown says. “It felt like a really special way to present the song and just kind of put it in his camp and let Zach kind of treat it however he wanted to.”

“I Am Not Okay” was the first song recorded for the next album at Saxman Studios, owned by session drummer Grady Saxman. Crowell’s primary goal was to inject more grit into the performance than he heard in the demo. “It had a happier feel, a softer feel,” Crowell says. “When we went to record it, we tried to find a different vibe, just to put it a little more in Jelly Roll land and have a little more of a motion to it.”

Session musician Nathan Keeterle translated the demo’s piano intro on a guitar with a rubber bridge – it sounds a tad like the resonator guitar in the intro of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” Combined with scrape-y, ethereal electric guitar and pedal steel sounds, the track has a mysterious, ominous tone, eventually giving way to a subtle spiritual current created by a string section led by arranger David Davidson, who overdubbed a quartet multiple times.

“It’s probably 100 tracks of strings, just mixed real low,” Crowell says. “I wanted strings on it, just for the emotion of it. But I didn’t want it to get too triumphant and too dramatic.”

During the final vocal session, Jelly Roll tinkered with several small lyrics – “I’m,” “it’s,” “we’re” – at the end of the chorus. As a result, the song takes on a wider meaning as the personal “I’m not okay/But it’s all gonna be alright” becomes more cultural the second time around: “It’s not okay/But we’re all gonna be alright.”

“It felt like the message we wanted to leave people with,” Jelly Roll says. 

His unconventional vocal style – frequently loud and a little raspy at the height of a phrase, trailing off at the end with little diaphragmatic support – was perfect for the song. “It’s not a secret that I am not a classically trained vocalist,” he says. “When I sing, I sing what I feel, what I felt, and I know what it feels like to be in that moment and know what it feels like to have fans tell you what they are going through. I pull from that, and that’s what you hear.”

Stoney Creek had several options for the first single from the next album, but settled on “I Am Not Okay” because of its emotional heft. It currently sits at No. 14 on the Hot Country Songs chart dated July 20, and rises to No. 19 on the corresponding Country Airplay list. Clearly, the world is responding to the much-too-familiar battle with depression that “Not Okay” depicts.

“It’s not a linear path or cure-all, and in the case of addiction, it’s an active choice each moment and still a back and forth,” Jelly Roll says. “In those moments where you’re saying or feeling ‘I am not okay,’ it’s that push and pull of that moment we wanted to capture.”