The year just keeps getting better for Jelly Roll. The “Son of a Sinner” singer added another notch to his gilded belt on Thursday night (May 16) at the 2024 ACM Awards when he shared the music event of the year prize with Lainey Wilson at the Ford Center at the Star in Frisco, Texas.
“First time nominated, first award and it couldn’t have happened for a more meaningful song,” Jelly Roll said of his win for “Save Me” with Wilson at the show produced by Dick Clark Productions. Speaking to Billboard after the event, Jelly said he decided to add Wilson to the song after he recorded it solo because he wanted to “hear it from a woman’s point of view.”
As an example of why that was definitely the right call, he said his stylist told him she listened to the track “1,000 times and loved it,” but when she heard the version with Wilson she cried because, as she told him, “it felt like it was one of us singing it. I was like, ‘WOW,’ it just covered me in chills. I knew then that it was going to be a special song.”
Jelly said he had a premonition that Wilson was going to be the biggest star on the planet, but after the breakout year she’s had, he thought, “What a great year for me to have a song with her!”
While Jelly Roll has been at the game for a while before his big blowup began taking hold over the last 24 months, he said he and pal Wilson talk all the time about the wild rocket ride of fame they’ve both been on lately and love to share notes and advice. “It’s been so awesome. We’ve been so paralleled and everything. We talk about it openly and honestly,” he said of the small group of fellow artists — which also includes Cody Johnson — that he huddles with to “lay it all on the table.”
In the midst of a red-hot streak that has had anyone and everyone knocking on his door for a collaboration, Jelly Roll had no problem naming the one call that wowed and delighted him the most. “Whenever I got the call to do the MusiCares with Jon Bon Jovi and then I met Sir Paul McCartney at the same time,” he said of the February gala honoring the Bon Jovi founder at which the country star performed a gritty cover of the Jersey rockers’ “Bad Medicine.”
“There’s a picture that exists on the Earth of me meeting Sir Paul McCartney and Jon Bon Jovi at the same time… that was the one that was like, ‘get out of here man!,’” he joked about the pic he keeps sending around to friends and swearing is not a PhotoShop job. Now that he’s been awarded for his Wilson collab, Jelly Roll said the next duet partner on his bucket list is definitely Jersey giant Bon Jovi. Or James Taylor, or Bob Seger.
Watch Jelly Roll talk about his big night and his pinch-me photo op above.
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