How we wrote Jelly Roll’s ‘Halfway To Hell’ by Jessie Jo Dillon

Jessie Jo Dillon: “Whenever I’m with an artist in a room, I feel very protective of them.”

Inside the spontaneous session that shaped a raw, reflective anthem about identity, contradiction, and the push between good and bad

Jessie Jo Dillon is a songwriter on one sweet hot streak. The current Academy of Country Music Songwriter Of The Year, to list a few of her recent cuts will show you why she is more than deserving of such acclaim. Old Dominion’s Memory Lane, Tyler Hubbard’s Back Then Right Now, Megan Moroney’s Girl In The Mirror, Keith Urban’s Messed Up As Me, Carter Faith’s Strong Stuff, and Dying To Be Pretty by Tenille Arts are just a handful of songs that have benefited from her Midas touch.

Of course, it’s no overnight success and the native Nashvillian has been grafting hard for well over a decade to get to where she is today. Along the way, she has written songs for the likes of George Strait, Cole Swindell, Maren Morris, Tim McGraw, Dan + Shay (she co-wrote the billion-streaming 10,000 Hours), and many more.

We asked Dillon to tell us the story behind Jelly Roll’s 2024 classic Halfway To Hell…

Discover our Nashville special edition

Released: 22 January 2024
Artist: Jelly Roll
Label: BBR
Songwriters: Jason DeFord, Jesse Frasure, Matt Jenkins, Jessie Jo Dillon
Producers: Jesse Frasure, Zach Crowell
UK chart position: –
US chart position: 48

“With Halfway To Hell, that was such a cool day because it was the first day I met Jelly Roll. He’s from here, he’s from Antioch. I’m so happy for him and his whole crew and his family. They’re such an eclectic bunch and they all deserve all the success in
the world.

“It was with my friend Jesse Frasure, we’ve gotten a lot of cuts and work a lot together. He’s a producer who has produced Thomas Rhett for a long time. He texted me one day, or called me, I can’t really remember which one. I think Jelly had just had Son Of A Sinner go to No 1 and Jesse was like, ‘Do you want to do a day with Jelly?’ And I was like, ‘Man, I would love that. Hell yeah.’ Me and Jess and Matt Jenkins, who we write with a lot, had a day coming up in our calendar, and Jesse was like, ‘I just want to add him to that if that’s cool?’ I was like, ‘Absolutely.’

“We were at Jesse’s studio in Nashville, and Jelly came in and I loved him immediately. He has that effect on people, because he’s unabashedly himself, it’s very disarming. Matt Jenkins had that title idea, ‘Am I halfway to heaven or hell?’ and we all were like, ‘Holy shit,’ you know, because I think we all feel like that a lot. I remember Jelly saying, because he was almost done with his album, ‘Man, that is so wild that you have that idea. Because I feel like my record has almost turned into this concept record for me.’ That then became Whitsitt Chapel, because there was a lot of themes of religion, and, ‘Am I a good person?’

“We wrote that song very fast. It kind of just fell out and I love that song. I remember in the chorus specifically I had said that, ‘Halfway to heaven or halfway to hell / My angels and demons at war with myself,’ and that’s when Jelly was like, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ I love words and I don’t like being on a song that I don’t think the lyric is good. I definitely paid a lot of attention to them, and I wanted to really describe him. ‘I’m a county jail revival/I’m a bottle and a Bible,’ all of those things are very him and he’s very open about that.

“Whenever I’m with an artist in a room, I feel very protective of them. I’ve watched people before, big songwriters, steamroll them, and I don’t like that at all. It’s their record, what they want to say to the world. Like Jelly, a lot of them that I work with are amazing writers too, so they make it easy. But if someone’s shy, I feel very protective of wanting to say something the way that they would want to say it, and I definitely feel called to that with a lot of my favourite artists I work with, like a Megan Moroney or a Jelly, because who they are is what makes them connect so much.

“That’s another thing with a lot of songs I’ve co-written with artists, aside from my own talent on paper, like a melody thing or a lyric or whatever… it’s an understated gift to be protective of an artist, or your co-writers, let them express themselves.

“Jesse also had that track, he had worked on a track before we all even got there. So Zach [Crowell], Jelly’s producer… a lot of the demo of that song is in the actual master recording. Jesse sent him a lot of the stems and some things got added to it by Zach. In the room we’d changed some things about it. But that was one of those days that was, again, very collaborative. I feel like the best days usually are, when there’s pieces of everybody in it.

“Live, it’s fire. It is so good to see him do it live. I think he’s even opening with it now. We all feel a little like that, we feel a little good and a little bad. There’s power in looking at that. On that song we did really capture that thing of, a lot of times we’re just a big paradox as a human, with our good qualities and our bad qualities. Nobody’s perfect, and I think we all have nights and mornings where we wish we were a little bit better than maybe we are”

You can follow Jessie on instagram.com/jessiejodillon

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