Jelly Roll’s CMA award was beautifully broken, just like his new album of the same name.
The country music star, 39, told Jimmy Fallon Monday night about how, after becoming one of the oldest people to ever win new artist of the year at the awards show in Nashville last year, he immediately “fumbled” the glass award.
Fallon then played a clip of the sound of shattering glass during a live local broadcast from backstage at the show.
“Oh goodness, Jelly Roll just broke his award,” WKRN-TV reporter Stephanie Langston can be heard telling another reporter. “Yeah, he’s still standing there. I’m pretty sure it’s his award. He just dropped it on the floor.”
“First of all, when it first dropped, you could’ve heard a mouse pee on cotton,” Jelly Roll told Fallon. “I mean, it was dead silent, and right after you could’ve heard a cricket fart, you heard a bunch of people go ‘Aww.’”
He explained that the weight of the award and his sweaty palms likely played a role in the unfortunate incident.
“I was just so excited and so nervous that I had the sweatiest, shakiest palms,” he said. “And that thing is — I’m already not a physically fit man — and that thing’s heavy. That thing was really heavy.
“And I was so excited, and I was going to change it from one hand to the other to shake somebody’s hand, and it just boomed,” he said. “And I was like — this is the story of my life though, Jimmy. I finally get my life together. I win the biggest award — best new artist — I was one of the oldest people to ever win it. I was 39 years old. I gave a passionate speech, and then I came backstage and fumbled the ball. Just fumbled the ball!”
“No, no, be you. Never stop being you, though,” Fallon replied.
Jelly Roll added that he “campaigned” for the awards show to let him keep the broken one instead of getting a new one.
“I was like, ‘I think it fits me great. I’ll just duct tape it together,’” he told Fallon.
The shattered award reportedly was just a generic one though.
A CMA official told The Tennessean last year the award hadn’t been engraved yet because the winners weren’t known beforehand.
Jelly Roll also described a concert during his struggling artist days that only five people showed up for, leading him to invite all the attendees to party in his van.
“It was a night we played outside of Sacramento, California, in Orangeville, little place called The Boardwalk,” he explained.
“I pulled up, there was five people, and I felt so bad for the door guy, sound guy and the concessions guy. They were all the same person. And I felt so bad for him that I was like, ‘Don’t even open the door.’ And I brought all five people in my RV.”
He told Fallon to imagine a “1975 Cheech and Chong RV.”
“There was smoke coming out of the hood. There was smoke coming out of the inside,” he said of his old RV. “It smelled like Willie Nelson and cheap beer. It was all bad, man. I actually just brought all five onto the crappy RV and we just partaked in a peaceful pipe together. And I just told them I was sorry I couldn’t perform.”
He explained that he canceled the show because he felt bad for the one guy working the show “because, at that point, we needed to put two of the five people that bought a ticket to help him. He was doing three jobs.”
Telling Fallon how he turned around his life after dozens of arrests in his teens and 20s, the 39-year-old said, “As cliché as it may sound, [the answer] is faith, finding love. It softened my heart. I fell in love with a woman and got married. I had a daughter. It changed my whole life. She’s 16 now, so that’s getting interesting, but it’s still really good.
“And it just made me want to be a good father and a better human. And I knew I was just a crappy person for so long, man. I [am] just destroyed. I was just a bad human, and now I’m trying to turn that around. I’m a totally different guy, man. It’s awesome.”
He also talked about how he came up with the title for his new album and tour, “Beautifully Broken.”
“I think that we’re all a little broken, but I think it’s finding beauty in that,” he said. “And we use kintsugi for the idea that they do in Japan that if something is worth saving when it breaks, that they bring it back together with gold and they polish it. That’s kind of our message, man, is everybody’s worth saving.”
“Beautifully Broken” is out Oct. 11.
