Jelly Roll Says He Felt “Overwhelmed” by His Phone

Jelly Roll shared that having a phone was causing him to feel an overwhelming sense of guilt.

It’s no surprise that Jelly Roll is hard to reach, given his packed schedule of sold-out shows and appearances. However, contacting him just got even harder because he decided to get rid of his cell phone completely.

On December 16, Jelly Roll joined his wife Bunnie on her popular podcast Dumb Blonde. During their candid conversation, the “Save Me” singer opened up about how his cell phone had been taking a toll on his mental health.

“I was getting to a point that I was getting hundreds and hundreds of text messages a day. And I just was overwhelmed,” he said. “And then when I would finally sit down to go back through them, I would just feel like such a bad human for missing them. I was carrying a lot of guilt. This phone was causing me a lot of guilt.”

The four-time Grammy-nominated artist admitted that he eventually hit a breaking point and decided it was time to take matters into his own hands.

He shared that one night while driving through Nashville, TN, he asked his driver to take him to the Cumberland River. Once there, he made the bold decision to throw his cell phone into the water.

Bunnie, who has been married to Jelly Roll for eight years, made sure to mention that this wasn’t the first time he had done something like this.

She pointed out that he had previously taken similar steps to disconnect.

“Like, my husband has been throwing phones away,” she said. “I’ve had the same number for almost a decade. My husband has had about 17.”

But maybe this time it will stick, especially since he says that the new plan is to switch to a “flip phone next year.”

“It’s healthy for me. I would use my phone as a way to [dissociate] as well,” he added. “I would be missing text messages and know there were so many over there that it was too stressful to go check. So I would avoid that by mindless scrolling, or, you know, I had these news alerts on my phone, and then we become big news stories all the time,” he said. “It’s like, I started getting caught up in that.”

“I realized the phone does not help me be any of the stuff I actually wanna be,” he finished.