Watch: Kellie Pickler Details “Blessed” Life in First Interview Since Husband Kyle Jacobs’ Death
Kellie Pickler and Kyle Jacobs were planning to have a big wedding, figuring the more the merrier to watch them tie the knot.
But before the invitations went out, the Nashville-based couple of two years realized something.
“Every time we got to the guest list, it was like, ‘Oh my God, I hate half these people.’ Nothing personal,” Pickler said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show a month after she and Jacobs eloped to Antigua. They swapped vows on the beach Jan. 1, 2011, which she called “the most incredible day of my life.”
She had “1-1-11” engraved on her husband’s wedding band on one side—and “Put it back on!” engraved on the other, so he’d know exactly what to do if he ever took it off.
There was no instruction manual to follow after Jacobs died by suicide on Feb. 17, 2023. And Pickler didn’t pretend otherwise.
“One of the most beautiful lessons my husband taught me was in a moment of a crisis, if you don’t know what to do, ‘do nothing, just be still,'” she told People in August 2023, making her first comment in the wake of Jacobs’ death. “I have chosen to heed his advice.”
Pickler, who’s turning 40 on June 28, continued to take it slow, not returning to the stage until April 2024, when she performed at a tribute to Patsy Cline at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium.
“A lot’s happened, and I’m very blessed,” the Albemarle, N.C., native said on a May episode of the American Idol official podcast after appearing on the show that made her a household name for the first time in years, reflecting on all the twists and turns her life had taken.
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After she and Jacobs swapped vows ankle-deep in the water on an Antiguan beach, they took off for Baghdad because Pickler had a previously scheduled USO commitment.
And the couple would continue to team up for causes close to their hearts, hosting the Island Time Music Festival in 2021 to benefit the Little Yellow School House in Mexico after being involved witht the event for years.
“It’s one of the more beautiful things that we’ve ever done,” Jacobs said on the Talk to Chuck podcast, prompting host Chuck Wick to tease that he never realized that the songwriter was as nice as his famously cheery wife.
“He’s got a good heart!” Pickler chimed in. “He’s a good man.”
The common denominator among all the reactions to Jacobs’ death as tributes poured in from friends and fellow musicians was shock.
Autopsy results later released by the Davidson Country Medical Examiner stated that there were no traces of drugs in Jacobs’ system when he died, but he had a “history of chronic alcohol use.”
Pickler opened up about her own year-long battle with depression in 2008, telling People, “Everything in my professional life seemed great. But in my personal life, I was just crumbling.”
She credited support from friends and the love of the then-new man in her life for helping her out of a dark place, sharing, “He makes me feel so good about being me.”
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Pickler stayed out of sight for months after Jacobs died, having already stepped away from her post as midday talent on SiriusXM’s contemporary country channel The Highway in April 2023, before she was finally ready to speak publicly.
All the support she had received “truly touched my soul,” she told People that August, “and it’s helping me get through the darkest time in my life. As many of you have told me, you are all in my prayers.”
The “Best Days of Your Life” singer, who rose to fame when she finished sixth on American Idol in 2006 and solidly ranks among the long-running show’s more enduring success stories, met Jacobs in 2008 when she literally spotted him across a crowded room at a Nashville bar.
“I didn’t know who he was or what he did,” Pickler recalled on The Real in 2015. “We just locked eyes and I went, ‘I gotta know everything about this person.'”
They closed the place down, too busy talking to realize all their friends had left them to it.
Jacobs popped the question June 23, 2010—the birthday of Pickler’s beloved late grandmother—on the beach at sunset, a precursor to the idyllic island nuptials they ultimately decided on.
On The Kelly Clarkson Show in 2019, Pickler recounted the moment when she proposed throwing wedding planning to the wind and just running off together: “He goes, ‘Whew, thought you’d never ask!'”
On their USO tour, “All of the soldiers at each spot where we would stay at had a ‘honeymoon’ suite for us. It was the funniest thing.”
A few years later, signing up to do a reality show may have not been the obvious move for a couple enjoying such a drama-free marriage, but their intentions were pure, according to Pickler.
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“For us, we are so blessed and we just want to be a bright light in the world,” she explained on The Steve Harvey Show in 2015 (thereby securing her and Jacobs’ future spot on Celebrity Family Feud as well). “We want to laugh and have fun and live. There’s a big difference between being alive and living.”
Their reality show I Love Kellie Pickler ran for two seasons on CMT, following her and Jacobs as they lived the sweet life together, at home in Nashville and on the country music circuit, tackling lighthearted issues like his snoring problem and their friend’s fear of cotton balls along the way.
And there wasn’t a trace of irony to be found anywhere in the show’s title.
“One of my favorite things about Kellie is just the way she looks at life,” Jacobs shared in an episode testimonial. “She just loves to laugh. She just doesn’t take things too seriously.”
The couple traveled to Japan to wrap up their show’s second season, Pickler sharing that she had wanted to see the world since she was a kid, which is part of the reason why she loves her chosen profession so much.
“Growing up in such a tiny little town where you know what you know, and you don’t know what you don’t know,” she explained in 2016 on the podcast Get Real With Caroline Hobby. “I’ve always been that person, that little Curious George explorer that wanted to push the boundaries and go.”
Stressing that she only formed opinions based on her own experiences and “what I witness with my own eyes,” Pickler said she was endlessly interested in people and finding out what made them tick.
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Catching up with E! News in 2022, however, she sang the praises of home.
“I’m such a simple girl honestly,” she said. “I love gardening. My friends call me the fifth unofficial Golden Girl. I’m that 104-year-old trapped in a 35-year-old body. I love puzzles. I love good conversations. I love to sit on the front porch in my rocking chair. I just like to be in good company.”
Her SiriusXM hosting gig at the time was right up her alley, but so was going home at the end of the day.
“I clock in and I do my job and then I come home and I’m a wife,” she said. “I’m a friend. I’m a neighbor. I’m a godmother. I care about things that truly matter. I hate the word ‘celebrity.’ It dehumanizes people. I clock out of that world as quick as possible and I keep my feet on solid ground in the real world.”
Professed wanderlust aside, that perspective was pretty consistent with what she’d said a decade prior about keeping it simple.
“For me, success is being in a place of happiness,” she told Taste of Country in 2012. “I know a lot of people that are in the business and people that are not in the business, that have other professions, that you look at and they have it all. There’s nothing that they don’t have except for one thing and that is they’re not happy.”
“For me,” she continued, “I feel very successful in the fact that I have come so far from my raising and how I was brought up to where I am now. I look at my husband and I think, ‘This man…this is all I need.'”
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Getting to work with her husband through the years was an added bonus.
“Kyle is a sanctuary for me,” Pickler told The Knot in 2016. “I’m so blessed to be able to experience this life with my best friend. My life partner. He’s my adventure-travel buddy and just my treasure.”
Playing a little rapid-fire game with Hobby on her longtime friend’s podcast in 2016, Pickler picked Jacobs when asked what made her excited.
“He’s so wonderful,” she said. “He does excite me.” Hobby observed that they had “the best relationship.”
In a 2014 interview for McPherson Guitars, Jacobs described his typical day as, “I wake up in the morning and have my coffee, and eat my Cheerios. Spend some time with my wife and I’m pretty much writing a song every single day at 12 o’clock.”
Writing and producing could be “rather taxing,” the Minneapolis native said, “but I will never complain. Still to this day, I can’t believe it’s what I do for a living, and it truly is a blessing…Five, 10 years from now, honestly I’d love to just still be doing what I’m doing.”
He also shared that he got his first custom-made McPherson as an anniversary gift from his wife, with their wedding date “1-1-11” engraved into the back of the headstock. He called it “literally the most beautiful guitar” he’d ever seen or played.
Jacobs used the instrument to perform their wedding song “Say I Do” while Pickler danced the rumba on Dancing With the Stars in 2013, during the week the contestants paid tribute to the best year of their lives.
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If you or someone you know needs help, call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also call the network, previously known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.
(Originally published May 13, 2023, at 5 a.m. PT)
