Country star wants to talk to the people he robbed 24 years ago

Country singer Jelly Roll is trying to right the wrongs he caused.

Hoping to heal from the pain he inflicted on himself years ago, the “Need a Favour” singer found himself during an in-depth interview with host Jay Shetty on the “On Purpose With Jay Shetty” podcast where he talked about the need to speak in a vulnerable state to reach out to the people he robbed for weed as a teenager.

As an adult, he was charged with aggravated robbery and faced 20 years in prison. He ultimately served more than a year on the charge and then served more than seven years on probation.

“I really want to have a conversation with them. I was thinking of getting in touch,” he told Shetty. “That was 24 years ago now. I just don’t know how to even begin this or, you know, how to approach it, because sometimes I wonder if maybe they’ve even seen me in passing or are aware of my success. I wonder if they correlate at all. I mean, I’ve obviously changed dramatically. I was 15, dude, you know what I mean? I couldn’t grow facial hair at all. I barely hit puberty. I still had my high-pitched voice when I committed that robbery. So I’ve thought about them a lot and they’re definitely on my list.”

The “Save Me” singer expressed the urge to apologize, take responsibility and ask for forgiveness.

“I had no business taking anything away from anyone,” Jelly Roll continued. “Just the claim I had, that the world owed me enough that I could come and get your things. It’s just a terrible way to look at life and people. What a terrible way to interact with the Earth.”

“I hope they realize that my life’s mission is to change and change people, because that’s what I embody most in what I do. I think people cheer for me because they see a little bit of me in them, or because they see their cousin – I’m a family member, they say, and I speak for an unspoken group of people, and I hope they would know that. (…) I try hard to prove that not only have I changed, but that I have also taken the platform seriously and that it makes me change more every day. I hope they would forgive me,” he added.

As the interview continued, the singer talked about how much he has changed compared to the person he once was.

“I look back on those years and I’m so embarrassed to talk about it,” he revealed. “I was a bad person in my early thirties, but until my mid-twenties I was a really terrible child. People always say: You’re the nicest guy I’ve ever met. I think I’m so glad you didn’t meet anyone who knew me 20 years ago.”

“I have not taken any responsibility for anything in my life. I was the kid who, when asked what happened, would immediately start blaming everything but myself. And it took me years to break through that, like years of work, solid work to just break through that. It also took years of work to even forgive this child,” he explained.