The pair chatted with the media during a triple No 1 celebration
Last week, Lainey Wilson and Jelly Roll teamed up to celebrate the chart-topping success of three hit singles. Wilson celebrated “Watermelon Moonshine” being her fifth consecutive No. 1 while Jelly Roll reveled for his back-to-back No. 1s — “Need a Favor” and “Save Me,” the latter a duet with Wilson.
The pair united with their fellow co-writers Rob Ragosta, Joe Ragosta, Austin Nivarel, David Ray, and Josh Kear at the BMI and ASCAP-hosted event at Tin Room near Nashville’s Music Row. The record-breaking country stars held a Q&A panel for the 250 music industry members and friends in attendance where they discussed everything from their meteoric rise to superstars to new music and more.
Jelly discussed how uploading “Save Me” to social media changed his life forever when he thought his path was going to be different.
“The truth is, I think if I would’ve never hit upload with ‘Save Me’ and been bold to try that different thing, I think I would’ve achieved what I thought my dream was at the time,” he said about his hit duet. “My dream was just to sell two to three thousand seats everywhere in the Southeast and Midwest and my daughter could grow up in the best school district in the state of Tennessee. I had just enough money at that time to afford a house in that school district. I was the first person [in my family] that owned more than 700 square feet of house ever, so I was already like this is my dream. If I can just maintain and not fuck this up for her, it’ll be great… I was so uncomfortable… It completely changed my life. My wife was my A&R. She called it.”
The Grammy-nominated “Save Me” wasn’t initially intended to be a duet. Jelly said the thought of adding another voice to the track made him apprehensive until he heard Wilson in the studio.
“‘Save Me’ was special to me, like, to me,” Jelly shared. “I don’t think people fully grasp as an artist that sometimes songs mean so much to us, to some degree, we don’t really care what it does outside of that. It’s more about the actual art, and you’re just like, man this is just special to me, so I was kind of like anti-doing anybody on it anyway. I was already like this is my story, this is my most vulnerable moment ever, and 200 million people watched it on YouTube already, I don’t know if I wanna go back to the well again. I knew that if I could do it with somebody in the genre, it was country, and it was Lainey for sure… I walked in a skeptic that day [she recorded her vocal] and I knew how great she was. She did her microphone check, and Zach Crowell — I watched my producer get goosebumps on his neck. I watched Joe Jamie’s arm fill up with goosebumps, and I then got ’em, and I was like, ‘This is it,’ and she was like fuckin’ around at that point.”
“When I heard that maybe they were interested in me doing the female part of the song, I was like, ‘Man this could be really cool to hear the female perspective of this,'” Wilson added. “I had kinda made a promise to myself that any song that I cut that I didn’t write, I needed to feel like I wrote it at least. I needed to feel like I had been through it or experienced it in some kind of way or it was a story that just needed to be told, even if it wasn’t mine specifically. It was something I could relate to 190 percent. Maybe that’s why they got the chills and the goosebumps is because I was just singin’ what I was feelin’ and so proud to be part of this song.”
Wilson discussed how being crowned Entertainer of the Year by the Country Music Association (CMA) last fall was career-changing.
“I’ve been working on my relationships in this town for 13 years ’cause I knew at the end of the day I could be a decent singer, I could be a decent songwriter, but if I was a good person, people would remember that more than they would remember my songs,” Wilson shared. “And I think in situations like that, that has come in handy. I will say when we won [Entertainer of the Year] — I’m just the type of person where I’m not like, ‘All right! We did it, you know, that’s it, like we just won the biggest award you could possibly win.’ I was like, ‘Okay, well they they crowned me Entertainer of the Year so it’s about time I show them that I am.’ And you know for the ones who thought that I deserved it for the ones who thought I didn’t, and that’s just that’s just who I am and in part of my DNA, too. But at the end of the day, you know I take the gift. I accept it with an open heart, but at the end of the day it [doesn’t] define me and that’s not what made me want to start writing music in the first place and it’s not gonna be the thing that makes me continue writing music. It’s just so a really nice gift from up above of being recognized, and like I said, I appreciate it so very much, but there’s a lot of other things that keep me going.”
Both are working on new music and will tour extensively this year. Wilson recently released “Country’s Cool Again” from her forthcoming third studio album and will embark on the headlining Country’s Cool Again Tour this summer. Jelly also confirmed new music could be heard as “early as April” with a duet partner currently being sought for a ballad that is set to appear on the project. The multi-genre hitmaker will headline the Beautifully Broken Tour that runs through the fall.
