Here’s Why Jelly Roll Threw His Cell Phone Into the Cumberland River

Jelly Roll is off the grid — and his phone is somewhere at the bottom of the Cumberland River. In an effort to reduce stress, the country star recently chucked his cell into the water and has no plans to replace it, he revealed on the latest episode of Bunnie XO’s Dumb Blonde podcast.

On the episode posted Monday (Dec. 16), Jelly began by saying, “I can confidently tell people I’m not gonna have a phone all of ’25.”

The “Son of a Sinner” singer then recounted to Bunnie — whom he married in 2016 — a recent drunk night out that ended with him asking his driver to pull over so that he could get out of the car and lob his phone into the Cumberland, which runs through Kentucky and Tennessee — not that it was an on-the-fly decision. “I was determined,” Jelly recalled, laughing. “I talked about this in interviews all year. I was like, if this tour goes the way I want it to, I’m gonna throw my phone off the Shelby Street Bridge.”

Jelly went on to explain why it’s more “healthy” for him to be phoneless, noting that he’ll probably downgrade to a simple flip phone in 2025. “I was getting to a point that I was getting hundreds and hundreds of text messages a day,” he shared. “And I just was overwhelmed. 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.”

“I would use my phone as a way to avoid,” the Nashville native 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. I started getting caught up in that. It doesn’t make me a better person.”

Jelly is currently on break from his Beautifully Broken Tour, which picks back up in Canada in March following a festival performance at Coors Light Birds Nest in Scottsdale, Ariz. In April, he’ll join Post Malone on a two-month joint North American stadium trek.

While on tour, the musician — who recently performed two tracks at the 2024 Billboard Music Awards — has been open about his weight-loss journey. On Dumb Blonde, Jelly explained why he’s stayed so public about the process, telling Bunnie, “I want to be honest about my struggles with it for people.”

“I think that people that become as big as I became, when they lose the weight, they’re so ashamed that they go and hide and lose the weight,” continued Jelly, who revealed he’s now lost 140 pounds. “I wanted to lose [weight] in front of everybody, I wanted to talk about it. I want to bring people along with me.”

Listen to his episode on Dumb Blonde below.