Jelly Roll’s music is known to hit you deep in the soul, and that’s perhaps especially true for his emotional song “Save Me.”

“I’ve always considered my music cathartic, I always called it therapeutic music,” Jelly Roll, whose real name is Jason Bradley DeFord, told Loudwire Nights. The country rocker’s categorization truly hits the nail on the head for his 2020 single “Save Me,” as his fans on YouTube have described it as a “very moving and brutal song” and one that “hits hard.”

Since the success of “Save Me,” Jelly Roll has released more heartfelt songs and continues to perform with music legends, like he will at NBC’s three-hour Opry 100: A Live Celebration special. There have undoubtedly been many monumental moments in his career, but Jelly Roll has said “Save Me” changed his life. Read on to find out what the lyrics to “Save Me” are about, the song’s quick success, and more.

What is Jelly Roll’s song “Save Me” about?

Jelly Roll described his song “Save Me” as a “personal cry for help” in an interview with Billboard. The single from his 2020 album, Self Medicated, tells a raw story of someone struggling with something difficult — feeling like a “lost cause” or “beyond repair” — and pleading for help.

The first verse is especially vulnerable, as Jelly Rolls sings the following lyrics: “Somebody save me, me from myself / I’ve spent so long living in hell / They say my lifestyle is bad for my health / It’s the only thing that seems to help / All of this drinkin’ and smokin’ is hopeless / But feel like it’s all that I need / Somethin’ inside of me’s broken / I hold on to anything that sets me free.”

Written with producer David Ray, Jelly Roll told Billboard he was “in the thick of it” when “Save Me” came to be in the middle of the pandemic. “I knew the lifestyle I was living at that moment wasn’t one that could be sustained,” he said. “I needed to make changes in my life … Thankfully now I can say I’ve made a lot of positive changes, but I’m still a work in progress.”

Over the years, Jelly Roll has spoken candidly about his past struggles with substance abuse. Nowadays, the “Son of a Sinner” singer told People he’s “made a lot of peace” with his past. “I can tell you, today, right now, I’m happy,” he said.

Jelly Roll says his song “Save Me” changed his life

The creation of “Save Me” happened in a matter of days. During a 2024 interview on The Howard Stern Show, Jelly Roll said he heard the song’s most memorable lyrics while he was sleeping. “It’s the only time in my career this has happened,” he told Howard Stern. “I heard ‘somebody save me,’ that melody, in a dream, to the point that I thought I stole it.”

The Tennessee native revealed on Theo Von’s podcast, This Past Weekend, they quickly got to work. “We wrote it Saturday, recorded it Sunday, shot the video Monday, and put it out Tuesday,” he said. “Didn’t think twice about it.”

Just 72 hours after Jelly Roll uploaded the acoustic music video in June 2020, “Save Me” had blown up. Today, that video has nearly 300 million views on YouTube.

“It changed my entire life,” he told Stern about the song, adding that he gets chills “every time” he hears it.

While “Save Me” was an instant success, leading to a remix with Lainey Wilson and being sampled on Eminem’s 12th studio album, Jelly Roll released it for a more personal reason. “I just knew there was something about it that stirred my spirit … I was proud of it. To me, it was like a therapy session publicly. That was the biggest thing for me, like, letting those emotions out in a public way,” he told Von. “I loved ‘Save Me’ so much, I didn’t care what it did.”

Jelly Roll was inspired by Bette Midler’s “The Rose” while writing “Save Me”

Jelly Roll revealed on The Howard Stern Show that “Save Me” was inspired by Bette Midler’s song “The Rose” because he and his mother would listen to it all the time together.

“My mother would play this, keep in mind she was a really dark woman at the time, but she would say, ‘Play this at my funeral,’” he told Stern. “She would sit at the kitchen table, I still get emotional listening to it, and she would smoke these cigarettes and be like, ‘Just remember to play this when I die.’”

The song and his mother mean so much to Jelly Roll that this shared connection also inspired his first tattoo. “The first tattoo I ever got was a tattoo of a rose on my back with her name,” he told Stern.

Jelly Roll previously shared on Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist that his mother struggled with her mental health and fostered his love for music as a young boy. “My relationship with music kind of came through her because when she would come downstairs, it would be for music,” he told the NBC host in 2024. “As a child, I just immediately related that music helped people.”