Kane Brown is set to release his new album, The High Road, on Friday (Jan. 24). It includes a collaboration with Jelly Roll about a tough subject: Depression.
They’re obviously cool now, but in a revealing interview with Taste of Country Nights, Brown insists that Jelly Roll used to really hate him.
“I heard of him before he had ever gotten in the country industry, because I was hanging out with some other guys that were in the world that Jelly was in,” Brown explains. “We had the same kinda background.”
But they never talked to each other, even though they had mutual friends.
“Our buddy, Taylor Phillips, he told Jelly … so Jelly will tell you this, he hated me,” Brown says.
As fans may remember, when he was just coming up in the ranks, Brown was pretty shy and subdued as an artist.
“Taylor told him [Jelly] ‘Nah, man, you don’t know him — he’s just really quiet.'”
Brown, now 31, is recalls that he reached out to Jelly Roll directly so they could cut through the beef and ideally, become friends.
“Taylor ended up telling me the story, so I ended up reaching out to Jelly, I was like, ‘Hey buddy, this industry’s crazy. If you ever need to sit down and talk to me, or play COD’ — I play a lot of Call of Duty — ‘You can come and talk to me about it.'”
Jelly took him up on it, and they played Call of Duty together. They were fast friends.
“So we ended up laying Call of Duty and hitting it off and basically just text all the time,” Brown says of their friendship now. “Random FaceTimes at 3AM.”
“I wrote this song and though of him jumping on it.” That song is “Haunted.”
“But the funny thing is, the other day we were shooting the music video for it and he was like, ‘Is this thing on?'” Brown says Jelly asked, mimicking what the “Save Me” hitmaker did next.
“He was like, ‘I used to f–kingng hate this dude!'” Jelly Roll said into the camera, per Brown. “That was the first thing he said. It was right in front of my team and everything.”
“Then, he [Jelly] was like, ‘But now I love this guy!'”
It threw Brown for a loop, even though he kind of knew Jelly didn’t like him before they really knew each other.
“I was like, ‘You never told me this in person,'” he says.
Fortunately, it’s nothing but love and good vibes these days.
“Jelly’s such a good guy, man. I love him and I’m proud of his success and he amplified this song, I’m just glad he’s on it,” Brown says. “Hopefully we get a big hit that’s huge awareness for people to know they’re not alone going through depression.”
In support of his new album, Brown will embark on his The High Road Tour in March.
Hear a Snippet of Kane Brown’s “Haunted” With Jelly Roll
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