By India McCarty
Brandon Lake took some inspiration from friend Jelly Roll’s story of throwing his smartphone away and disconnecting to focus on family.
“He’s really helped me because his lifestyle right now — he is traveling like crazy, but he’s also a husband and a father,” Lake told Fox News of Jelly Roll.
The pair are friends and collaborators; their duet, “Hard Fought Hallelujah,” has over 19 million streams on Spotify.
“For the first hour we talked on the phone, we didn’t even talk about music. We talked about being a father, being a husband, traveling on the road,” Lake said of their first conversation. “It’s really not even a balance; it’s a full-on juggle.”
The worship artist continued, “He had told me how he threw his phone in the river after his Bridgestone show in Nashville. I was like, ‘Tell me more about that!’ He’s like, ‘I’m calling you from a flip phone right now.’”
Jelly Roll has previously shared this story, telling wife Bunnie XO on her DUMB BLONDE podcast, “I was determined. 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.”
He explained, “I was getting to a point that I was getting hundreds and hundreds of text messages a day. 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.”
Brandon Lake took a page out of Jelly Roll’s book and got a new phone. He admitted that it’s not a flip phone, but he did get a new number.
“I needed to kind of focus on my circle of people,” he said. “So many people had access and, while I would love to be friends with everybody, it really, in this season…the bigger things have gotten, the smaller I’ve had to go and make sure I’ve had the right people around.”
Lake also shouted out Jelly Roll for encouraging him over these last few months.
“I’ve stepped on some really scary stages in the past few months, and he’s just believed in me every step of the way and it’s been incredible,” he concluded.
Related: How a Christian Artist Connected with This Country Star for Worship Collab
In an interview with the Grammy Award website, Brandon Lake discussed their friendship in further detail, saying, “We talk every few days to just catch up. He has shared so much wisdom with me, and he’s also been very honest about how much my influence has rubbed off on him and given him more confidence to talk about his relationship with God and his struggles.”
From their massively popular duet to connecting over their commitment to family, Lake and Jelly Roll have a truly amazing friendship.
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