Category: News

Farm Aid 40 Unites Generations Of Artists: Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Billy Strings, Jesse Welles, More

For four decades, Farm Aid has stood as both a concert and a cause. Founded in 1985 at the height of the farm crisis, the benefit has helped support America’s family farmers through recessions, droughts, and floods, reminding us year after year that music is not just entertainment but a catalyst for solidarity and social change. On Saturday, that legacy was renewed as 37,000 fans filled Huntington Bank Stadium in Minneapolis for Farm Aid’s 40th anniversary.

The milestone arrived at a critical moment, as U.S. farmers once again face mounting economic challenges. With crop prices falling and bankruptcies on the rise, the sense of crisis is eerily similar to the conditions that first inspired Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp to launch Farm Aid.

The all-star lineup reflected Farm Aid’s balance of tradition and progress, featuring co-founders Nelson, Young, and Mellencamp alongside fellow board members Dave Matthews and Margo Price, the youngest addition to the organization’s leadership. They were joined by a diverse roster including Bob Dylan, Billy Strings, Kenny Chesney, Steve Earle, Lukas Nelson, Wynonna Judd, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, Trampled by Turtles, Waxahatchee, Eric Burton of Black Pumas, Jesse Welles, and Madeline Edwards.

Throughout the day, collaborations amplified the event’s spirit of solidarity. Lukas Nelson teamed up with Dave Matthews on Daniel Lanois’ “The Maker” and welcomed Sierra Ferrell for a string of duets including Neil Young’s “Unknown Legend”. Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds enlisted fiddler Jake Simpson from Lukas Nelson’s band, while Billy Strings and Jesse Welles joined Price for a fiery take on Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm”.

Welles and fellow newcomer Madeline Edwards, at 32 and 29 respectively, underscored Farm Aid’s generational reach. Edwards impressed early in the afternoon with a soulful set that positioned her as one of the day’s breakout stars. Welles’ set, meanwhile, cut sharp with commentary-laced originals like “The Poor” and “Red”. He cheekily dedicated his song “Philanthropist” to Bill Gates “and the millions of acres of farm land that he’s stolen from the good people of America,” before closing on a lighter note with “Bugs”.

Price, who received her introduction from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, opened with the defiant anthem “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down”, the last song performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! before the host’s controversial suspension. Steve Earle, newly inducted into the Grand Ole Opry, bookended Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats with two appearances, cementing his role as elder statesman, while Wynonna Judd, Eric Burton, Trampled by Turtles, and Waxahatchee each brought distinct flavors to the nearly 12-hour program.

As always, the concert’s final moments carried the greatest weight. Nelson, Young, Mellencamp, Matthews, Price, and the entire Farm Aid family (save for Dylan) gathered for a heartfelt finale of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”, “It’s Hard to Be Humble”, and “I Saw the Light”. Gov. Tim Walz introduced Nelson by praising him as “a man who truly embodies the American spirit—fiercely independent, generous, kind, irreverent, decent, and a bit of a hell-raiser.”

Forty years on, that spirit remains intact, and so does Farm Aid’s mission. “Don’t believe it when they tell you we ain’t in it together,” Dave Matthews told the crowd, reminding them that the challenges facing farmers are shared struggles. As Neil Young indicated during a press conference where he argued Minnesota-based Cargill and other corporations “need to pay a conscience tax to the farmers of America,” the fight is far from over. Yet for one night in Minneapolis, thousands proved that through music, community, and conviction, the circle indeed remains unbroken.

Watch the entire Farm Aid 40 webcast below and click here to donate to the cause.

Farm Aid 40 Unites Generations Of Artists: Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Billy Strings, Jesse Welles, More, By James Sissler, September 21st, 2025
https://liveforlivemusic.com/news/farm-aid-40-unites-generations/

John Berman: Bill, I know you have a special guest, someone who performed earlier in the day.

Bill Weir: That’s right, John. It’s rare to be scrolling through your feeds and find what you think may be the next Bob Dylan. Uh, that is definitely the case. I’m not singular in that observation. Many other people have had that, which is why Jesse Wells just played his first stadium. Uh, this talent out of Ozark, Arkansas. Good to meet you, Jesse.

Jesse Welles: Hey, good to meet you. Yeah.

Bill: You like the Dylan comparisons? What do you think of that

Jesse: Sure. All right. You know, that’s flattering. The shoes are too big to fill. But, you know, I think people just grab the closest thing they’ve ever seen to it and and uh that’s the comparison they draw.

Bill: Well, in addition to your music, which I love, and your voice I love, you are continuing this tradition of voices of conscience. You write songs about the war in Gaza and about United Healthcare. You wrote a song after the Charlie Cook assassination. It was very poignant. What is it that makes you lean in, while plenty of artists would rather avoid politics altotogether?

Jesse: Uh years things have gone down. I haven’t seen anyone really talk about it. Not to say that they’re not out there or whatever, but I just I myself hadn’t really seen it. It seemed like a vacuum there. And uh I woke up one day and reckoned, well I’d talk about it. Yeah. I got nothing to lose.

Bill: So that’s what is the what is generally the response? I imagine some people, like fans of folk music and protest bands through the years appreciate it. Do you get any push back? Do you get in these politically charged times?

Jesse: They might push back, I suppose. I don’t much look but the main point is to make a place for people to have a conversation about just what is the crux of the problem. That’s you’re kind of you’re fostering or facilitating a place for people to have a discussion with a tune.

Bill: You know, I could see faces lightening up as your lyrics landed in the daytime set earlier today. What is your writing process? Is it that you you absorb the news and it just comes out or can you talk about that?

Jesse: Oh, I just I’m just always writing. I’m just always writing. So, if I get a good rhyme, then that one will be a tune, you know. Yeah, sometimes the rhymes ain’t even that great, they still become tunes, you know.

Bill: Well, Bugs is a favorite with my 5-year-old son.

Jesse: Yeah, I like Bugs.

Bill: And I’m coming to Webster Hall to see you. So, congrats on your first stadium set. And this is the beginning of a long important career, I hope, for you.

Jesse: I appreciate that. I can’t wait to see you. Webster Hall will be a lot of fun. So, yeah.

Bill: I’ll see you there. Jesse Wells, everybody out of Ozark, Arkansas. Just one of an amazing— Look at this. There’s some real appreciation, across the demographics.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Farm Aid will hold its 40th annual concert later today in Minneapolis. The nonprofit was founded by musicians Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Cougar Mellencamp back in 1985 to support family farms across America. One of the newer voices taking to the stage this year is Jesse Welles, a musician whose social media posts have attracted a large online following. Minnesota Public Radio’s Clay Masters has this profile.

CLAY MASTERS, BYLINE: Farm Aid was pretty surreal for Jesse Welles last year. He got an email from John Mellencamp asking him to play, that Welles says he had to vet to make sure it was real. When he showed up to the gig, Dave Matthews rushed up to him.

JESSE WELLES: And he said, my name is David Matthews. I’m a very, very big fan of everything that you’re doing. And the whole time I’m just thinking, you’re not David. You’re – this is – you’re Dave Matthews, man (laughter).

MASTERS: Matthews introduced him on stage at last year’s Farm Aid in New York State.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DAVE MATTHEWS: I think he’s one of the best songwriters I’ve ever heard in my life. And he’s prolific, and he’s young and he gives me hope, and he’s unbelievable.

MASTERS: Welles has garnered a large following for songs he’s written quickly about current events and then posted online, just him standing in a field, singing and playing his guitar.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “WAR ISN’T MURDER“)

WELLES: (Singing) War isn’t murder. Good men don’t die. Children don’t starve, and all the women survive. War isn’t murder.

MASTERS: Welles is 32 years old and had fronted rock bands since he was a kid. He was living in Nashville for a short while but moved back home to Arkansas after his dad had a heart attack last year. Welles says he was considering hanging up music.

WELLES: In the face of that potential death, I thought we don’t have very long. I can repurpose this craft that I’ve been working on all these years, and I’ll sing the news. I’ll sing the state of affairs.

MASTERS: “War Isn’t Murder” was the first song he posted in this style, a song about countries minimizing casualties during wartime. It was posted when people were protesting Israel’s war in Gaza on college campuses.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “WAR ISN’T MURDER“)

WELLES: (Singing) That’s what they say. When you’re fighting the devil, murder’s OK. War isn’t murder. They’re called casualties. There ain’t a veteran with a good night’s sleep. Let’s talk about dead people.

MASTERS: The song has more than 2 million views online.

WELLES: All you must do is write your tune and play it to your phone and let the public be the judge of your craft.

MASTERS: This one was posted after a Boeing whistleblower who raised concerns about defects with the company’s 737 Max jets died of an infection.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “WHISTLE BOEING“)

WELLES: (Singing) You can know a lot. You can know a little. But whatever you know, just don’t blow the whistle. You can toot a flute. You can play the fiddle. But whatever you do, just don’t blow the whistle.

MASTERS: Musician and Farm Aid board member Margo Price says Welles is a needed voice in music.

MARGO PRICE: He has such a penchant for really documenting the times and doing it in a poetic way. We need more voices like that.

MASTERS: In “Domestic Error,” he sings about the country’s troubled times.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “DOMESTIC ERROR”)

WELLES: (Singing) If I ever want to see that flag up high, I’m going to have to cut the pole in half. ‘Cause most of the time, most of our lives, it’s been flying down at half-mast. Hotels, casinos and spaceships, Teslas and tunnels are fine. Folks get too close to the big White House, and they lose their [expletive] minds.

MASTERS: As for his songwriting craft, Welles says the lyrics usually dictate the sound of his songs.

WELLES: Once you put a line to a melody, in a way, something alchemical happens, and you won’t necessarily be able to change the melody after that. After that first hearing, you are, in a way, tattooed.

MASTERS: Here in this song, he’s critical of the baby boomer generation.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “THE GREAT CAUCASIAN GOD“)

WELLES: (Singing) There is a foolish generation, squandered all their father’s pay. They are running out of time left to enjoy. They would kill and eat their own if the TV told them so. So they’re keen to watch the world burn just to make a point.

MASTERS: Organizers of Farm Aid say Welles is a great addition to the lineup of artists, as many of their festivalgoers have become concerned about corporate power and consolidation. It’s true to Farm Aid’s mission of not only helping farmers but also using music to amplify its message these last four decades.

For NPR News, I’m Clay Masters in Minneapolis.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “THE GREAT CAUCASIAN GOD“)

WELLES: (Singing) Does not the Lord abide in Texas, and in Waco and the rest of every Israel that hubris ever claimed? Does the Lord abide in prisons full of men with holy visions? Don’t the Lord abide in every tent and…

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/20/nx-s1-5521947/farm-aid-celebrates-its-40th-anniversary-with-a-benefit-concert-in-minneapolis

From the middle ages up to the modern era, society has leaned on its traveling troubadours for truthful commentary on the times. These folks trek from one town to the next, relaying the news, putting pain into words and healing with a little humor.

Jesse Welles unassumingly upholds and continues this tradition. Fearless, he reports from the frontlines of a divided country on the brink, addressing inequalities and injustices, cutting through all bullshit and driving directly to the source of the matter. His songs leave the same mark in front of a sold-out club as they do under the unbiased eye of a smartphone camera as he strums his guitar alone in the wilderness of Arkansas.

Following tens of millions of streams and a groundswell of acclaim from Rolling Stone, the New York Times and more, the singer, songwriter and guitar player cuts deep on his 2025 full-length album “Middle.”

“Breathe to write, write to breathe,” he says. “Humans are meant to create, so I’m gonna create music and keep releasing it constantly.”

Jesse calls Ozark, Arkansas, home. You might’ve caught a glimpse of Ozark on the HBO documentary Meth Storm or in Paris Hilton’s reality television show Simple Life, but neither do it justice. With a population of 3,590, it’s a place where most families reside down dirt roads. The town consists of a turkey plant, an engine plant, a gas station or two and a handful of restaurants.

Growing up, his father worked as a mechanic, and his mom as a school teacher. Early on, his grandpa copied The Beatles’ White Album and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for Jesse. Those cassettes would become the soundtrack to endless hours of bike rides and treks through the woods, long bus rides to and from school, and walks to the library. At 12-years-old, he finally scrounged up enough to dough for a “$56 first act guitar from Walmart.” It became like another limb to the boy. Bringing the guitar everywhere, he played along to the radio, studied “what the grownups did” during impromptu jam sessions at parties and gleaned nuggets of wisdom from local old-timers. He fed his obsession by checking CDs out of the public library and ripping them to the family computer, embracing classics from Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez and Woody Guthrie. He experienced another revelation “as soon as YouTube made its way to Arkansas.”

“Once somebody showed me Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, I was fucked,” he laughs. “We had waited like 10 years for our library to get the internet. Then, the old Pentecostal women who worked there wouldn’t let me plug in my headphones!”

Not one to take such news lightly, he actually wrote a letter to the Franklin County Seat and received permission to return to the library (with headphones in tow). Throughout high school, he balanced school band, playing football,and maintaining his GPA with jobs as a waiter at a Chinese restaurant, a DJ at the local country radio station KDYN Real Country, and chain-sawing trees at a local nature reserve. Simultaneously, he wrote, recorded, and performed original music, selling CDs at school. Upon graduating, he transferred from University of Arkansas to John Brown University where he picked up a degree in Music Theory. He further cut his teeth as the frontman for rock band Dead Indian, while also moonlighting as a standup comedian with “some rough characters.”

Relocating to Nashville, he launched his eponymous band Welles, releasing music and touring incessantly. He logged 280 shows in a year, canvassing North America and Europe alongside the likes of Royal Blood, Highly Suspect, Greta Van Fleet, and Dead Sara. Dropped from his old label (mid-Pandemic), he quit a job at a vegan meat manufacturer and returned to Arkansas. He consciously put music on the backburner. Reading voraciously, he devoured books by everyone from Cormac McCarthy to Mary Oliver. He funneled his excess energy into running, completing and pacing half-marathons and marathons.

In February 2024, life changed again when dad suffered a heart attack. Sitting in his father’s hospital room with a Woody Guthrie biography on his lap, Jesse realized what he needed to do.

“I was like, ‘I’m going to sing the news’,” he recalls. “There was a lot of war going on. That was bugging me—on top of my own shit life. I’d done my best to give up music, but I couldn’t. I decided I’d do this.”

He walked into the Ozarks, placed his phone on a tripod, sang right to it and posted the performance. The ensuing series of videos made a seismic impact online. He impressively attracted over 1 million followers on Instagram by performing tunes like “Cancer,” “Fentanyl” and “War Isn’t Murder” out in the cold. On a creative tear, he served up two full-length albums, namely Hells Welles and Patchwork. Audience enthusiasm manifested on the road, and he sold out successive headline tours. Capping off 2024, he railed against the corruption of the healthcare system in the powerful polemic “United Health,” which Rolling Stone hailed as “a John Prine-like ballad.”

Now, Jesse turns the page on another chapter with the single “HORSES.” The track hits its stride as guitar gives way to wailing fiddle. His gravelly delivery transfixes, “I’m singing this song about loving all the people that you come to hate…I thought I was gathering oats for my horses, but I was getting by whipping my mules.”

“It’s a pro-love song,” he notes. “Fear leads to hate. Hate leads to all kinds of atrocities. You build up walls. If you love everyone, it’s a lot easier on you—and everybody else too. Hate is a whip for the mule. Nobody gets nutrition from it.”

A steady beat sets “WHEEL” in motion. Jesse leans into the laidback groove and goes with the flow on the breezy hook. “You can roll the windows down and turn ‘WHEEL’ up,” he grins. “I love the notion of us being on a wheel that’s spinning forever. It’s a concept you’ll find in all sorts of religions and spiritual ideas”

Then, there’s “WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME.” He sets the scene right away, “I was reading Blood Meridian on the hood of my car.” A hummable acoustic melody underscores an emotionally charged refrain punctuated by harmonica and a scream, “Why don’t you love me, honey? What can I prove?”

“I took everything I love about seventies Dylan and Nirvana and smashed it together,” he goes on. “I’m dealing with the angst you feel when you don’t get noticed by somebody, whether your partner, parents, friends or boss. What more do I have to do to make you believe in me? The verses are just me being a weird space cowboy in Arkansas, reading books on the hood of my car and thinking about guitars and ponies.”

Jesse is speaking the kind of truth you can’t get on the news or on social media. This is the kind of truth that’s best shared with a microphone over the vibrations of an open chord.

“If my music helps you believe you can make art and tell the world how you feel, there would be nothing better,” he leaves off. “I hope you get those paints out of the garage or fill up your journal. Turn on your phone and say what you gotta say. There’s so much wild stuff in my head. I want to see where it can go.”

https://www.farmaid.org/artists/jesse-welles/

Jesse Welles Says ‘It May Take a Couple Years’ to ‘Really Understand’ the Weight of Working with John Fogerty

Welles was nominated for emerging act of the year at the 2025 Americana Honors & Awards

• Jesse Welles tells PEOPLE at the 2025 Americana Honors & Awards that teaming up with Fogerty, the lead singer of Creedence Clearwater Revival, is an “unbelievable” feat that he will need to take some time to process
• “It’s super duper good. Also, I don’t think it is really set in yet, because it is just kinda unbelievable to have John right there,” Welles adds of their live performances together, which took place on Sept. 8, Sept. 9 and Sept. 10
• During the 2025 Americana Honors & Awards, Fogerty presented Welles with the free speech award

Jesse Welles is still processing the profound nature of his relationship with the legendary John Fogerty.

The “War Isn’t Murder” singer, 32, tells PEOPLE at the 2025 Americana Honors & Awards that teaming up with Fogerty, the lead singer of Creedence Clearwater Revival, is an “unbelievable” feat that he will need to take some time to process.

“It was … I know he didn’t intend for it to be this way, but it was essentially like, here’s a lesson on how to play my song from the guy who wrote it,” Welles shares of performing “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” with Fogerty during a surprise duet at Nashville’s Exit/In on Sept. 9.

The former recorded and released an acclaimed cover of the song with Mt. Joy in 2024, and first joined Fogerty in a live cut of the track a day earlier during the BMI Troubadour Awards on Sept. 8.

“So it’s super duper good. Also, I don’t think it is really set in yet, because it is just kinda unbelievable to have John right there,” Welles adds of their live performances. “It may take a couple years for me to really understand the full weight of it, but to have his blessing, I don’t know how to put it into words.”

During the 2025 Americana Honors & Awards, Fogerty presented Welles with the free speech award, honoring his commitment to relevant, resonant storytelling through his music, which often focuses on Welles’ interpretation of hot-button current events and societal criticisms. At the end of the event, Welles, along with the rest of the evening’s nominees, came together with Fogerty for a medley of Creedence Clearwater Revival classics, “Up Around the Bend,” “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” and “Proud Mary.”

Welles, a student of both rock legends such as Fogerty and folk heroes such as Woody Guthrie, John Prine and Bob Dylan, recognizes a lineage between his work and those who came before him, but is steadfast in reminding all that his perspective is uniquely his own.

“My formative years were spent listening to these folks like Woody Guthrie. I feel like those are the ones I always get compared to, a lot of John Prine too,” he shares, but quickly adds, “Those shoes are too big to fill.”

The singer continues to note, “People compare you to what they’ve seen before, what’s familiar. But it doesn’t make you the same. [While I was making] rock and roll, everybody always called me … Kurt Cobain, you know, and it’s just people grasping at straws. Even Bob — Bob Dylan isn’t Woody Guthrie any more than I’m Bob Dylan. These are all one-of-a-kind individuals.”

Of the inspiration behind his thought-provoking lyricism as a whole, Welles shares, “The ingredients you got bake the cake you get, and right now in the oven is a very strange group of ingredients and a lot of situations happening simultaneously where the outcomes are unpredictable.”

Jesse Welles Says ‘It May Take a Couple Years’ to ‘Really Understand’ the Weight of Working with John Fogerty, By Chris Barilla, September 15, 2025
https://people.com/jesse-welles-says-performing-with-john-fogerty-is-unbelievable-exclusive-11810220

 Jesse Welles was honored with the 2025 Spirit of Americana Free Speech in Music Award at the 24th annual Americana Honors & Awards in September 2025, in addition to being recognized as a Lifetime Achievement Honoree by the Americana Music Association. He received the Spirit of Americana Award from the First Amendment Center for his commitment to free speech in music.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Sept. 4, 2025) — Today, the Americana Music Association announced this year’s Lifetime Achievement Honorees for its 24th annual Americana Honors & Awards show on Wednesday, September 10. This group of top-honor recipients includes Joe Henry, McCrary Sisters, Old 97’s, Darrell Scott, and Jesse Welles. This year’s honorees will be celebrated during the prestigious ceremony at the Ryman Auditorium.
…

Jesse Welles channels the grit and poetry of rock’s golden age through a lens all his own. With a voice that balances intensity and weary soul, Welles crafts songs that echoes the voice of Woody Guthrie: honest, jagged, and prescient. Welles’ ability to weave humor into serious themes is a highlight of his creative ability, and he brandishes the spirit of free expression. His songwriting often cuts into the heart of present-day social issues, touching on themes like isolation, inequality, injustice, and the emotional toll of an absurd modern life. Rather than shying away from uncomfortable truths, he leans into them, using his platform to reflect the world as it is—messy, beautiful, and worth questioning. Welles will receive the Spirit of Americana Award, co-presented by the First Amendment Center, our nation’s leading advocate for Free Speech.

https://americanamusic.org/the-americana-music-association-announces-2025-lifetime-achievement-honorees/

Jesse Welles Is Singing the Truth. Who Else Will Join Him?

Music has always been a compass in dark times. From Dylan and Seeger to the Dead and beyond, artists have held a mirror to power and refused to let lies go unchallenged. Today, as Donald Trump doubles down on authoritarian tactics, mocks science, and waves away inconvenient truths as “hoaxes,” we are once again at a crossroads. Every day of silence is another day he tightens his grip.

That’s why Jesse Welles matters right now.

Armed with just a voice, a guitar, and a sharp pen, Welles has stepped into a role too many others avoid. His song The List calls out corruption and secrecy head-on, demanding answers Trump will never give. His song PBS defends one of America’s last true pillars of knowledge, a cultural lifeline that politicians keep trying to gut. These aren’t safe topics — but they are necessary ones.

And audiences are responding. From TikTok clips to YouTube shorts, Welles’ music has found traction online, and now he’s selling out theaters across the country. People want truth. People want songs that don’t dodge the moment. And here’s this young artist from Arkansas — a state with one of the most conservative governments in the country — refusing to flinch, refusing to pander, and refusing to stay quiet.

Meanwhile, too many of his peers in the broader roots, jam, and Americana world have stayed on the sidelines. Yes, now and then, voices rise up — RockyGrass and Folks Fest both saw calls from the stage to reject Trump and his creeping authoritarianism. But those moments are too rare. Our musical communities, the ones that pride themselves on authenticity and truth, should be louder.

Because the truth is this: it cannot fall on one man alone. Jesse Welles is proof that the songs matter, that truth still resonates, and that standing up is possible even when the risks are high. But he shouldn’t be a lone figure on the stage.

The call is simple: we need more. More artists willing to take on the lies. More songs that speak to what is really happening in this country. More voices that refuse to let democracy, science, and truth be twisted out of shape by a man who would happily rule like a dictator.

One guitar, one voice, one truth can change the room. Welles has shown that. Now it’s time for others to join him.

Jesse Welles Is Singing the Truth. Who Else Will Join Him? August 24, 2025
https://www.gratefulweb.com/articles/jesse-welles-singing-truth-who-else-will-join-him

Can Jesse Welles Revive the Protest Song?

With a slew of topical grenades about everything from ICE raids to opiates, the Arkansas troubadour sure sounds like the voice of the Resistance. But he’s not as simple as that

It happened earlier this month the same way it always happens. Jesse Welles was scrolling on his cell at home in northwest Arkansas — Siloam Springs, population 21,000 — when he came across a recruitment ad for the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE to most of us).

“I thought, ‘Well, that sounds like a great use of my time,’” he says drolly. Putting down his phone, Welles mulled over the subject, opened a Google doc, and began tapping out lyrics written in the voice of a bottled-up ICE agent: “There’s a hole in my soul that just rages/Well, the ladies turned me down/And told me I was a clown/Well, won’t you look at me now/I’m putting folks in cages.”

Welles grabbed one of his acoustic guitars, set his words to a plucky folk melody, and eventually made his way to a nearby city park. To ensure as little background noise as possible, he headed for his preferred spot on a hill where the wind doesn’t blow so hard. Setting up his phone, pointed at himself, he began singing in a voice that evoked both Kurt Cobain’s anguish and John Prine’s wry mischievousness, his floor mop of hair bobbing back and forth to the beat. In no time, the new song “Join ICE” was on Welles’ social feeds, eventually racking up more than 1 million views.

Score another viral hit for Welles, and another step in the comeback of the protest song.

With Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the topical, off-the-news song has staged a minor comeback. Search long enough on TikTok or Instagram and you’ll stumble across outraged songwriters addressing the disarrayed state of the nation in homemade videos. But few, if any, are doing it as frequently and with as much of a social media impact as Welles.

Over the last year and a half, the 32-year-old has dashed off a barrage of outraged, barbed, or mocking songs about the mass casualties in Gaza (“War Isn’t Murder”), the Biden-Trump debate (“The Olympics”), the sorry state of healthcare in America (“United Health,” “Cancer”), opioid addiction (“Fentanyl”), Russian citizens drafted into the invasion of Ukraine (“How Many Times”), and those mysterious Jeffrey Epstein files (“The List”). And that’s just for starters. “It just helped me make sense of what was going on around me,” says Welles in a Zoom call from his home, displaying both his pronounced biceps and a mighty shag that makes him look like a hair-metal dude on a day off. “What you’re listening to is me making sense of the news: ‘What is this fentanyl crisis? Let me break it down in terms I can deal with and I’ll make it rhyme.’”

In a world awash in content, few should have noticed. But in a shift that indicates a desire to hear someone, anyone, sing truth to power during the disruptive Trump 2.0 era, Welles turned out to be the right man at the right time. His songs — most barely two minutes long, perfect for memes and viral moments — have accrued millions of views and largely supportive comments, as seen by the laudatory responses to “Join ICE.” Wrote one fan, “This is a dangerous song because conservatives don’t understand irony.” Another: “Been waitin for this, didn’t think it would be this fast. You’re always spot on but honey, you nailed this.” And this: “Incisive and savage. Great response to the moronic rhetoric and brutal policies of this sick administration.”

If that scenario sounds familiar, it should. Two years ago, a bearded Virginia troubadour named Oliver Anthony posted a raw-voiced tirade called “Rich Men North of Richmond,” also filmed in the woods and tapping into populist discontent. The song made Anthony a viral sensation, but he proved to be a one-rage wonder.

So far, Welles has managed to avoid that fate. Unlike Anthony, Welles has been mostly embraced by the more left-leaning Americana and folk world. At last year’s Farm Aid, Dave Matthews introduced Welles with, “I think he’s one of the best songwriters I’ve ever heard in my life. … he gives me hope and he’s unbelievable.” Both Sierra Ferrell and Billy Strings make appearances on Pilgrim, the insanely prolific Welles’ second of three albums released this year.

Nathaniel Rateliff also began waving the Welles flag. After meeting Welles at Farm Aid last year, the singer, who curated this year’s Newport Folk Festival, invited him to join the lineup. “It’s nice to hear somebody talk about anything that’s going on and calling things out as he sees it,” says Rateliff. “I don’t hear anybody in the media on TV talk about what’s happening in Washington. So, it’s nice for somebody to be literal about what’s happening and do it in the form of a song. He’s got a real Bernie Sanders approach to a song.”

At Newport, the demand to see Welles was so strong that his set was moved from a smaller side stage to the main one. Thousands watched, in blistering heat, as he played his musical commentaries and some of his even stronger, less overtly political songs, like “Change Is in the Air” and “Horses.” “I think they certainly connected with the ‘young Bob Dylan’ aspect of him being a protest songwriter,” Rateliff says. “People are hungry for that in some ways.”

Every era needs its voice of the people, and through timing, luck, and talent, that person may be Welles. “There’s a lot of people protesting different things in their own way, which is a beautiful thing about America, and something we can’t forget — that we have the great gift to be able to sing these songs, and I don’t have to worry about my life,” he says. “No one will come and kill me.” But like Dylan and others before him, will they look to him for answers?

THE SIGHT OF WELLES STRUMMING AN ACOUSTIC GUITAR and knocking out ditties wasn’t a surprise to Simon Martin. A decade or so ago, when they were friends in Arkansas, the drummer and Welles would hang out on Martin’s porch in Fayetteville. “He’d bring a guitar and just play these same little simply folkie chord numbers and make stuff up,” Martin says. “We were sitting around smoking some grass, making jokes, and being stupid, so it’s funny to see him out in the woods doing that. Of course, the lyrics are now much more meaningful.”

The son of a mechanic and schoolteacher, Jesse Allen Breckenbridge Wells, as he was named at birth in 1992, grew up in Arkansas, watching PBS shows on a TV set with what he calls “rabbit ears” and tolerating his sister’s love of ‘NSync and Backstreet Boys. He himself was drawn to vintage music — Gladys Knight and the Pips to the Guess Who, he says — by way of the local oldies radio station. In second grade he sang “Twist and Shout” in a talent contest and, by high school, was introduced to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.

By his early teens, Welles had discovered the guitar; in an early sign of his clever streak, he started a high school band named the Stimulus Package, after the Obama recession program. When he was about 20, he dubbed himself “Jeh Sea Wells” and began recording and posting his songs on services like SoundCloud. He attended local colleges, earning a degree in music theory, but was working at a local Waffle House when he put an ad on Craigslist looking for band members. Martin responded and, with a bassist, they formed Dead Indian, which reflected one of Welles’ obsessions: Nirvana. “Which was already 20 years after the fact,” Welles says of the grunge pioneers. “But listen, if the middle of the country is behind the coasts, then the middle of Arkansas is behind 30 years.”

Over the next few years, Dead Indian put out a few records of next-generation ravaged grunge and played around the area. Welles was already itching to move on. He and Martin started another band, Cosmic American, but a record executive who heard some of his music suggested Welles move to New York, L.A., or Nashville. He chose the latter, which wasn’t as far away from Arkansas, and thus began his next group, Welles, adding an extra “e” to his surname.

Welles’ potential as a rocker was clear to Eddie Spears, the producer and engineer who worked with the band Welles and has continued to collaborate with the musician. “Jesse’s real quiet and has a calm aura to him,” he says. “But when he got behind a microphone, he had that great raspy, loud angst, at least at that time. He really embodied an amazing anger, like what you imagine John Lennon was like when he was making Plastic Ono Band.”

Looking back, Welles describes himself as “a 22-year-old whose only ambition from the time I was a teenager was to be signed to a record label.” But that dream didn’t pan out. The band Welles scored a gig at Bonnaroo in 2017, released a few EPs and a full album in 2018, and toured a bunch, but the world wasn’t especially interested in grunge-metal thrashings. The album went nowhere and Welles found himself back home in Arkansas. “I didn’t know what to do,” he says. “I had been playing and touring for about four years, real steady, and Covid knocked everything off the road. All my friends and I, we didn’t know what to do. So I said, ‘Well, I know something I can do. I can go back to the country, and I can live cheap out there and regroup.’”

At first, returning to his home state was, he says, a downer: “I got back to Arkansas and thought, ‘Well, this is the end. I’m quitting.’” But when his father suffered a heart attack (he survived), Welles made a decision that would change his life. “I thought, ‘If he goes right now, I’ve barely had any time with him,’” he says. “At that point, I decided life was too short and I was just going to write music constantly and put it out with no gatekeepers. I was far enough away from any kind of music-industry thing to make me feel like there were no rules.”

That summer of 2023, Welles encountered Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” video and was duly inspired. “I saw Chris,” he says, referring to Anthony by his real name, “and I thought, ‘Oh, we can do that.’ Good to know. You don’t need anything. You can enact change on your own. I loved how green it was; it was pleasant to look at. And I thought, ‘This is the way to go.’”

Two months after “Rich Men North of Richmond,” Welles ventured to that park near his home, pressed record on his phone, and began singing and strumming songs for the camera. At first he stuck with covers by the Beatles, Paul Simon, Nirvana, and Donovan, among many, but as he says, “I was tired of trying to remember the words to the classic-rock tunes, so I thought I would do my songs.”

Beginning in March 2024, he ventured into his originals, starting with “The Olympics,” a take on the potential rematch between Trump and Joe Biden that captured how exasperated many were at the thought of two boomers duking it out again. (Name-checking “Hotel California,” he sings, “For giving us such amazing music we could almost forgive you for our situation this damn dire.”) “I was taking all my cues from a Guthrie standpoint,” Welles says. “I’ve always, from a young age, liked Woody Guthrie, but I didn’t understand when I was a boy that it was subversive, like a truth vessel hidden in a fun song.”

The song would eventually accrue more than 1.4 million views on TikTok and signaled a new era for Welles. That same month, his manager partnered with Q Prime, the high-power management firm whose various divisions rep everyone from Metallica and Greta Van Fleet to Eric Church and Ashley McBryde. “I still don’t know what the big deal is,” Welles insists. “I just knew as soon as people liked ‘The Olympics,’ I thought, ‘Well, you have to do better than that, and you have to do better than the next one, and you have to do better than the next one. You’ve got a lot of work to do, mister.’ That’s what I reckoned.”

The way many people gravitated toward what he’s called his “new iteration” does appear to have taken Welles by surprise. Last year, he attended an Arkansas show by Rateliff and the Night Sweats, and Rateliff learned more about Welles’ background, the origin of his woodsy videos, and how Welles was adjusting to his new role. “He was like, ‘That’s not really what I do, though — I was in all these, like, rock bands,’” Rateliff says. “He’s got a young punk in there.”

Still, the topical tunes — with melodies that recalled vintage Guthrie or Prine and videos that spelled out the lyrics in each — kept coming. Some, like “Cancer,” are scathing (“as lucrative a business as a war,” he sings). Others are sarcastic, as when he quips, “Hell, even Kushner agrees, it’s good real estate,” in “War Isn’t Murder.” “You have to give folks credit,” he says. “We’d like to believe our peers maybe aren’t as smart as us, but people are smart, and I never write down to anybody.”

osted just days after the assassination of United Healthcare head Brian Thompson, “United Health” mostly avoided commentary on the shooting but spelled out the ways that insurance companies riled up their own customers. Welles doesn’t feel he responded quickly enough to the incident, but the video has garnered more than 2.2 million views since it was posted. “I feel like I have finally put my foot down and decided what I needed to sound like and not tried to do anything anybody else really wanted of me,” he says. “I thought I needed to be a rock & roll player, but I just don’t have that coolness in me. To be able to just be myself, it just makes everything feel a lot better.”

Anna Canoni, Woody Guthrie’s granddaughter and the head of Woody Guthrie Publications, heard Welles last year, when “Cancer” popped up on a social reel. “It really got me to stop and take pause,” she says. “I listened to a few more songs and thought, ‘This is interesting.’ What made Woody stand out in his time was that he was singing songs about the Dust Bowl and the Depression to the people it was affecting. He was relating their story back to them in song. Jesse is doing the same thing. You go, ‘Who is this kid? Where has he been?’”

IN CONVERSATION, WELLES ISN’T QUITE THE FIREBRAND HEARD in his songs. Pausing before responding to questions, he sometimes cocks his head and glances to the side, pondering the appropriate response. But one question — about whether he voted in the last presidential election — doesn’t elicit an answer at all. Staring at his Zoom camera, Welles scratches his head and remains silent for 20 seconds. Finally, he says, “I just … I didn’t know I’d be talking about that kind of thing,” and declines to respond.

On last year’s “Trump Trailers,” Welles envisioned the current president as a trailer-park resident who would “run for supervisor” and “lose the vote, not give a damn/Run over the ballot with his dad’s Trans Am.” From songs like that (or “Signal Leak,” which pokes at Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s group chats), one may assume Welles leans a certain, liberal-minded way. “We didn’t talk politics much,” says Martin about his days with Welles in Dead Indian. “But he was always welcoming of people who were different: trans folks, people who weren’t white. He was especially kind to homeless folks. I remember he’d always sit down and give them a cigarette and have a quick talk with them if they were hanging around. I always figured he was on the left side of the spectrum.”

Welles is aware of the questions Oliver Anthony faced — or avoided — after “Rich Men North of Richmond,” the way the media tried to dissect where he stood on the issues. “I suppose that is part of the endeavor,” Welles acknowledges of what Anthony encountered. “People want to know, and you may not yourself know just exactly what’s happened or what’s going on. Maybe no answer is good enough. I can’t imagine that’s an easy position to be in.”

In general, Welles projects that he’s not beholden to anyone. To maintain his independence, he’s now releasing his music on his own, with no record company backing. “That is true freedom,” he says. “You’re not going to find protest music with the Columbia Records stamp on it. It’s certainly not playing on the radio or anything like that.”

That philosophy also seems to extend to his political views. Unlike protest singers of the past, Welles doesn’t point fingers at specific people; names like Trump, Biden, or Kamala Harris never come up. On his voter registration form in Arkansas, Welles didn’t declare a party affiliation. Instead, he speaks in generalities, opting to be the voice of those who don’t trust anyone or anything in the so-called system. “I think a lot of us are politically homeless,” he says. “We’ve been orphaned, and it’s likely that we have been since before I was born. It seems very apparent now, in a way that maybe it didn’t in the past, that nobody has your interests in mind. And now it feels like the first step in any kind of progress is unearthing the truth of the matter first, and we are arriving at that truth every day.”

How is that approach reflected in the current White House? Again, Welles doesn’t mention specific names, although he hints at Elon Musk. “How do they not care about the little man, the citizen?” he says. “It seems like eons ago, but I do believe there was a very prominent billionaire who was a very critical component of the government, for what seems now like just a blip in time. That was maybe one of the first times it was visible. If there is one takeaway, the American people can know, after decades and decades of war and coverup, that at the end of the day, we are not who they have in mind.”

Events of the last month, like immigration crackdowns and military call-ups, also elicit more philosophical musings than lashings out. “It seems like a great, concerted, and obvious distraction,” he says. “At all times, from all directions, throwing everything at the wall to see what will stick with the public. And nothing is sticking.” What are they distracting us from? “I don’t know what exactly, because none of us know what the truth is. But to distract any individual from the truth is the game plan, and has been for decades. But especially now.”

When he does get a bit more specific, his responses can be unexpected. In another online song, “PBS,” Welles sang about being a “kiddo down in Arkansas” who watched Mr. Rogers and “a purple dinosaur.” But he doesn’t seem as rattled as others in the music world by the collapse of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the way that may result in local public-radio stations being unable to play music on the air without CPB funding. “They’ll be fine,” he says, then adds, referring to himself, “It’s not the duty of National Public Radio to spin some loser’s record from Arkansas. They’re there to inform. The music has moved over to streaming. I don’t know who’s really relying on radio. Some of the biggest artists right now don’t even have any radio play.” 

Whether it’s careful or calculated, Welles’ strategy is savvy, since he wants to be known as more than just the guy spewing songs inspired by cable news. On his three latest albums, including this week’s Devil’s Den, he’s made a concerted effort to include only one social-commentary song per record. That slot on Devil’s Den goes to “The Great Caucasian God,” about, he says, “the evangelical lockstep with war in the Middle East, and kind of a radical notion of bringing about the end times by killing people.” With its starkly beautiful arrangements and moments of Mellencamp-reminiscent rock dynamics, the more generalized songs on Pilgrim tap into both the disorientation and frustration so many of us are feeling right now: The Great Plains sweep of “Change Is in the Air” gives way to the Cobain Americana of “GTFOH” (for “get the fuck out of here”).

Where Welles goes from here has even relative veterans like Rateliff intrigued. “Creating a space for yourself that feels authentic is something he’s done really well, but now that he’s arrived somewhere, I’m curious to see how he navigates all that, in a positive way,” says Rateliff. “The way people first discover you is how they see you. So even if daily political songs aren’t what Jesse is, it’s what people see him as now, and people create their own narrative. How do you continue to change and grow and present yourself if people have an expectation of you?”

After a return engagement at Farm Aid in late September, Welles will embark on a series of multi-night residencies in Chicago, Denver, L.A., San Francisco, and New York, all of which are sold out. He’s likely to draw crowds similar to the ones who flocked to his tour early this year and sang along with every word of “Fentanyl” and another fan favorite, “Walmart” (“I don’t wanna go to Walmart today/Or tomorrow/Or the day after that/It’s a mirage in a desert of bullshit they created”). “There are certain musicians who hit the right chords at the right time, when people feel a lack of empowerment,” says Canoni. “The beauty of Woody’s work is that music can bring people together, and that’s what I’m hoping for Jesse’s work. But,” she adds with a laugh, “no pressure.”

At Newport, a hint of Welles’ past, present, and future was there for all who attended to see.  He was invited onstage to join some of the festival’s boldface names, including Margo Price, Prine’s son Tommy, and Lukas Nelson. Welles played both solo and with a backup band. With Nelson, Welles brought out an electric guitar and joined in on a version of the Beatles’ “Revolution.” In a moment that somewhat echoed Dylan’s gone-electric moment 60 years ago that weekend, Welles ended by trashing and stomping on his guitar. Rateliff, who was standing nearby when it happened, thought the move was of a piece with Welles’ attempts to not be relegated to one musical bag: “He’s trying to let people know he’s more than just the guy with the guitar in the field. He’s Bob Dylan going electric every night.”

“It was just a whim,” Welles says now of the smashup. “At the moment, I thought that was the perfect thing to do. And still feels like the perfect thing to do.” Told that it felt more rock & roll than something one would see at Newport, he smiles and makes a possible Dylan reference. “I contain multiple dudes,” he says.

By David Browne, Photographs by Sacha Lecca
Can Jesse Welles Revive the Protest Song? August 21, 2025
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/jesse-welles-protest-songs-tiktok-politics-1235410873/

Meet Jesse Welles, Fiery Folksinger on the Rise

Welles, 32, is a genuine phenomenon—an internet-era troubadour clearly in the tradition of Guthrie, Dylan, Prine, and Ochs (and Cobain, too), yet also very much of this moment.

In some ways the Jesse Welles you’ve likely seen online, the shaggy young folksinger with the sandpaper voice picking a Stella guitar in a clearing under power lines, has only existed since 2024.

Before that, Welles had plenty of experience as a musician. Growing up in Ozark, Arkansas, he’d dug deep into ’60s rock and folk, writing songs and making home recordings and carrying his guitar everywhere. He performed under various monikers—Jeh Sea Wells, Dead Indian, Cosmic American—before landing a record deal as Welles and releasing the grungy album Red Trees and White Trashes in 2018. But after a few years of hard touring, disillusioned with the hamster wheel of chasing a big break, he quit—returning to Arkansas to see what his life might be like if he didn’t play music or just kept it to himself.

And then in early 2024, his father had a heart attack, and everything changed.

“I was sitting there next to him in the hospital, and he was hooked up to all this stuff and unconscious,” he recalls. “We didn’t really know what the outcome was going to be. And I thought, he was barely here a minute. He was here a blink of an eye. I didn’t even get to know him but for a little bit. How short is life? I’ve got so much work to do. 

“So I started writing like mad. I opened up. Really, from that moment onward, it was just like, I’m going to write and sing tunes until I’m all hooked up on a bed like that. We don’t have much time.”

Since that day Jesse Welles, reborn as a solo artist, has certainly lived up to his own promise, in an astounding burst of creativity that in just over a year has produced four full-length albums and an EP plus countless off-the-cuff song videos. [Since this article went to press, Welles has in fact produced three more full-length albums: Pilgrim followed just seven weeks later by the simultaneous release of Devil’s Den, on which Welles played all the instruments, and With the Devil, on which he performed the same song list as Devil’s Den but with a band. With the Devil is also available as a complete video performance on YouTube.]

Welles initially went viral with fearless takes on such topics as war in Gaza (“War Isn’t Murder”), fentanyl, whistleblowers (“Whistle Boeing”), Ozempic, and the killing of an insurance CEO (“United Health”). At the same time, he sings charming ditties on his favorite things (“Bugs,” “Books,” “Guitars”) and creates poetic, personal folk rock, captured in both homegrown solo recordings like Patchwork and in the full-band studio production Middle. Even more remarkable than the sheer volume of music he’s produced is how great so much of it is—evocative, empathetic, and above all, raw and real.

Welles, 32, is a genuine phenomenon—an internet-era troubadour clearly in the tradition of Guthrie, Dylan, Prine, and Ochs (and Cobain, too), yet also very much of this moment. Eager to learn more about his musical path, I connected with Welles on a video call from a Nashville hotel room, with his Stella close at hand, in the midst of a cross-country tour that completely sold out in two days.

What initially inspired you to pick up the guitar?

I knew that’s what I wanted. All the music I listened to had guitars in it. I was about ten, 11, and I had Sgt. Pepper’s and Abbey Road. I loved that last track on Abbey Road, “The End,” with the three guitar solos. Even “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” had big power chords, this real mean guitar. Though I didn’t know who was playing, it was the beginning of my probably lifelong affinity for Lennon’s playing. 

I didn’t have any kind of video, and I hadn’t really seen anybody play guitar, so I thought they were moving their tuning pegs awfully fast. I broke a lot of strings thinking you change the melody around like that. I didn’t realize you needed to fret it. 

You really didn’t have a concept of putting your hand on the fretboard?

No. It probably was a year and a half after getting a guitar [a First Act from Walmart], I asked my old man, because your dad’s supposed to know how to do everything, “Do you know how to play this thing?” I was at a loss. He’d never played a guitar in his life. I saw his big finger hit the fretboard, and he changed the note on the low E string. And I went, oh, shoot, that’s probably how you have to do this.

Not long after that, an old guy named Harlen Nichols who lived down the road had me over to his house, and he showed me how to play, like, “Camptown Races.” He drew up his own kind of tab on a little notecard, and he tuned up my guitar, because I didn’t have a tuner. I didn’t know how to tune it. He gave me lessons for really no good reason. He had grandkids, but I guess he thought it was neat that I had a guitar. He had a ’60s [Gibson] Hummingbird, a beautiful guitar. 

Did you start making up songs right away?

Yeah, I was always making up little tunes. Making up a tune was easier than learning somebody else’s.

What was some of the music that made you want to do that?

Those Beatles records that my grandpa had given me were really all I listened to for probably five or six years until I was a teenager and found Black Sabbath and Zeppelin and stuff like that. You know, I have an older sister. Looking back, it’s kind of funny, but boy bands were a big deal and Britney Spears was in the charts, but she seemed to have no interest in that sort of thing. 

I just loved the music that I got to listen to with Mom in the car on the oldies radio. It was a format that has kind of gone away, but it was British Invasion and Motown, essentially, and some classic country every once a while. 

So singer-songwriters like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan came to you later? 

A little bit later. I was 13, 14, when I went headfirst into it. I had the Encarta encyclopedia on a CD-ROM. You could look up blues music and folk music. Under the blues one, they had a 20-second clip of Lightnin’ Hopkins playing, and I would play these little bits over and over. They had Huddie Ledbetter, or Lead Belly, maybe Mississippi John Hurt. I heard about John and Alan Lomax, the father/son duo, and I went down to the library to get the songbook. I don’t know how to read music, but it had all the lyrics written out for “Cumberland Gap,” all the stuff they recorded at penitentiaries, and Appalachian songs, too. Anyway, through all that, I got ahold of Woody Guthrie. 

And then the library had that first Bob Dylan record. He’s just a baby on the cover, and he has a funny hat, and boy, I wore that record out. I really liked that. I also liked Peter, Paul and Mary, and as a proper preteen/teenager, I loved Simon and Garfunkel. It was so moody and so pretentious. I would listen to “The Sounds of Silence” and “I Am a Rock” and “Scarborough Fair,” and I fancied myself some kind of poet.

Did you always have the urge to share what you were learning or writing?

Yeah. The most important thing was finishing a song, getting some kind of bow on it. It didn’t much matter what it looked like when it got over the line. 

When I was 14, my buddy and I were playing guitar together, and his folks got him Sony Acid, the recording program. I borrowed that and put it on my computer, and I would multitrack. I had a washboard, a recorder, and my guitar. I was always recording and making little tunes. I loved to make my friends laugh. I had a guitar with me all the time. 

That desire to share your music right away aligns perfectly with social media. When did that click for you?

That wasn’t until February to March of ’24. I just said, well, instead of recording tunes, we’re going to be even less precious about it: we’re just going to perform them to the camera and that’s it—that’s the take. And trial by the internet. They’ll tell you just exactly how they feel about something.

You put out a mix of topical songs and more personal writing. Do you think of those as separate categories? 

On the Venn diagram, they have overlaps, but I don’t want to think of those things separately. I do think it’s all one and the same—the music is the music—but I can see how they look separate. One is me making sense of the news, and I suppose the other one is making sense of being alive. But either way, it needs to rhyme, so that’s the fun in it. 

In your topical songs, you often use classic folk and country forms. That’s very Guthrie-esque: writing new lyrics over a traditional structure. 

Sometimes I’ll have the melody, and the chord structure isn’t sorted out until I put up the take, and that’s the only time I ever played it like that. 

Those classic progressions are the vehicle, and also they’re tested with humanity. We all seem compelled and pulled towards those changes, at least in Western culture. 

You can’t think about that too hard. I feel like it needs to be catchy, you know? With other tunes, I can stretch out a bit, but it’s fun to sing about wizards and spaceships and feelings and religions and philosophies over I–IV–V too. 

So is your writing generally driven more by lyrics?

Yeah. I sit down and write a lot of stanzas, then go through and pick out what’s got the meat, what’s the strongest and the most succinct. You can say something real eloquently and take four stanzas to get the whole idea out. But in this mode, beauty is the simplicity. So you want to get that crunched down to a couplet ideally, or not even a couplet—just one line with some assonance in it, like a couple words that have similar vowel sounds. Something you would say to somebody at the gas station you’ve never met, just real quick and fun. That’s southern wit, southern charm—Twain was so good at that. 

So yes, all that to say, I’m preoccupied with the words, and we can worry about the melody and the harmony later. Every once in a while they come together and it makes a good tune. And sometimes it don’t, and you just keep going [laughs].

You’ve recorded several albums on your own, overdubbing tracks. What’s that process like? 

I recorded Hells Welles, Patchwork, and All Creatures Great and Small in my room in Arkansas. I would just get the take, vocals and guitar, and then dub. I put it into Logic. The computer is slow so you can’t dub too much, or it would start to have latency. I have a [Shure] SM57 and an SM7B, the radio vocal mic. You just get those two guys humming and put it in the computer.

An album like Middle is a whole different sort of project, working with a band and producer in a studio and, I imagine, tracking live. 

Yeah, just tracking it live, going in and listening to the tune, and discussing it a little but not too much. Doing a couple takes but not too many, and finding magic in the take.

Everything has been very fast paced. Hells Welles was recorded in like four days. But I thought Middle took a very long time, being there two weeks. That is a different process—you put things in other people’s hands, and there’s a division of labor which creates an efficiency and allows you to really focus on what you need to do—in my case, sing and play. I don’t think twice about what I would like to hear somebody else play. I just let them play. Their gut is going to tell them. If they are following their gut, the most honest thing will come out of them, and then we’ll have a very honest record.

So is part of that not getting too precious about how you sound? 

Absolutely—just let it go. The moment you try clambering for control or you have this notion in your head of something that you want to achieve, aren’t you setting yourself up for some kind of disappointment and desperation? The only reason I know is because I’ve had those records before, and you make yourself miserable. So I really think it’s best to just play the tune, trust your gut, and trust everybody else in the room. 

On guitar, you have a lot of facility playing lead and also slide. How did you develop that?

You know, I played guitar before I ever sang. My older sister’s the singer, and they always told me I sounded like burnt toast, so I just didn’t sing. My focus was guitar, and I loved everybody’s lead playing. I got the acoustic Zeppelin tab book when I was a kid, and I had to learn “Stairway.” I played a lot of electric guitar. Slide isn’t something I’d really ever played until Hells Welles, but just listening to the songs, I knew that was what they needed. The slide playing isn’t very good, but the melodies needed to be on slide guitar. I liked the idea of it all being on this Stella. This thing is probably better suited for slide than it is anything else I do on it.

My sense is that the earlier phase of your career, when you played in bands and were on a label, left you with a lot of cynicism about the music business. How are you approaching all that differently now?

In general, a lot of life is figuring out what you don’t want to do. Usually it’s by doing the things you don’t want to do that you realize that’s not what you want to do, even though that’s all you ever wanted to do up until that point. All I ever wanted to do was to be on a label and play in a rock ’n’ roll band. 

It’s dangerous, thinking of the music industry as this kind of abstract industry. That in itself will make you cynical, and it can make you treat people like a part of a thing, instead of as people. Once you realize that some of these abstractions we’ve gotten comfortable with and even grown fond of railing against, once you realize that they’re made up of individuals and people, then the monster, the boogeyman, the shadow disappears—and the light comes on. And I feel like once that happens, you can find the people that you would like to be around, that you would like to be creative with.

I don’t think that’s a view I had when I was a kid. You don’t have to play the game anymore. It’s the wild west out there. 

So you can build your own community around what you do?

It’s an à la carte buffet, man. The bigger you build it, the more people you’ll meet. What music industry? Make your own industry, your own factory. Your factory might just be your house in a subdivision in Arkansas. That’s my industry. I hired my cat. 

What’s your experience been like on this sold-out tour, playing for so many people who found you online?

I always get so excited to meet the people that dig it. I can’t contain it, it makes me feel so good. What’s nice is I go out and meet everybody after. I’ll go out to the merch booth and play some more songs, basically do a cover set after the show. 

I just like meeting everybody who likes the same things as me. It’s like I went out and found all my friends in every city. We all like to read, and we’re nerds, and we’re into being peaceful, and we’re into being open minded, and it feels like a big family reunion. Sorry, it’s way better than a family reunion—it’s just a fun gathering. They all sing along, which is great. We just have a good time.

It’s almost like you’ve had a long-distance relationship with most of the nation, and then you finally get to meet them. 

That must be good for breaking through the sense of isolation that many of us have these days.

It is wild how the web was [created] to connect us, and we found ourselves more isolated and more divided. So I think it can be used for great and good things. I think it’s really important to maintain that hope and the joy of being alive, and just accepting that the internet’s there, and you can be positive through it too.

What He Plays

Jesse Welles bought his Stella parlor guitar for $80, through Facebook Marketplace, on the way home from the hospital after his father’s heart attack. He isn’t sure of the guitar’s age—he believes it is pre-1960s—and he was surprised to learn that the low-budget instrument has had extensive repairs for cracks and such. 

Welles plays the Stella in social media videos and used it exclusively on Hells Welles. He also has a Gibson LG-2 heard on the entire Patchwork album. For recording, he says, “I only play one guitar for the whole thing. It’s good to get a guitar and marry it for a while, just say: ‘I don’t care how I feel—I may want to play another guitar, but I’m just playing you, baby.’ You let the guitar teach you about how you play.”

Welles has a Martin 000-15SM that he purchased to play at Farm Aid in 2024, and on recent tours he’s performed with a Rockbridge 000 Smeck, a design inspired by vintage Gibson Smeck models that shifts the soundhole, bracing, and bridge lower on the body to accommodate a 12-fret neck without changing the body profile.

Meet Jesse Welles, Fiery Folksinger on the Rise by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, August 20, 2025
https://acousticguitar.com/meet-jesse-welles-fiery-folksinger-on-the-rise/

Jesse Welles: Moments of Truth

Midway through Jesse Welles’ recent show at a sold-out Atlantis in D.C., a fan shouted out, “Tell ‘em Jesse!” “Tell ‘em what?” he asked back. “Tell ‘em what they need to hear.” He waited for a beat and cracked a sly smile: “No one asked for this.” The thing is, millions of people have.

The 30-year-old Arkansas native, who has taken to singing the news in wry folk songs he posts to social media— where he has nearly 2.5 million followers between Instagram and TikTok—has become a voice of his generation, whether he meant to or not. At shows, fans sing along to his simple-but-sophisticated numbers, which touch on topics as divisive as United Healthcare and Gaza and as common as Walmart and bugs. For Welles, who has been playing guitar since he was 11 and releasing music since 2012, it’s been a welcome reassurance. “It’s like meeting a pen pal or something,” Welles says. “I always knew everyone was out there. There were moments I did think I was crazy and now I know I ain’t.”

Often filmed outdoors in Arkansas, Welles’ songs and social media clips arrive at a dizzying speed. Since 2024, he’s put out multiple studio albums—the topical Helles Welles, the more personal Patchwork and this year’s Middle, a polished, rock-band effort devoid of current events. Late March brought Under the Powerlines, compiling 63 of his social media clips—raw takes, one-offs, Bob Dylan and John Prine covers—captured live. Pilgrim, which was released on July 4, incorporates the sounds of electric guitar, fiddle, pedal steel, along with collaborators Billy Strings and Sierra Ferrell.

In early March, Welles posted the satirical “SpaceXplosion” less than 90 minutes after first hearing about the titular explosion on the news one morning. “You’re running with an egg in a spoon and trying to get it over the finish line without dropping it,” he says.

 Of his songwriting ethos, a pace inspired by a revelation he had after his dad had a heart attack and nearly died, Welles says, “You can’t get precious with it. At that point, I had quit making any music and I was looking at him and all the tubes and stuff, thinking, ‘We don’t have long here at all.’ I said, ‘I’m gonna make tunes like mad, until they got me hooked up to a bunch of tubes.’”

Jesse Welles: Moments of Truth, Rudi Greenberg on July 25, 2025
https://relix.com/articles/detail/jesse-welles-moments-of-truth/