Category: News

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/

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.

~ Join Ice ~

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.’”

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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.

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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?

~ War Isn’t Murder ~

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.”

~ Hold Me Like I’m Leaving ~

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.”

Posted 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.”

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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.

Jesse Welles Writes Simple Protest Songs But He’s Complex
https://musicianvoice.com/index.php/2025/08/21/jesse-welles-writes-simple-protest-songs-but-hes-complex/

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 appears on Episode 2367 of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Their discussion is a wide-ranging conversation between Jesse and Joe Rogan that touches on music, social commentary, the role of art and creativity, and the business-side of the entertainment industry along with many conspiracy theory rants of Rogan.

Jesse reflects on growing up in a family where art was present (mom painting murals, dad welding) though not music-centric. The discussion opens with how music entered Jesse’s life early. There’s a focus on how Jesse writes fast, topical songs (for example about healthcare and corporations) and wraps serious issues into punchlines and melody. Jesse mentions writing a song about a large healthcare company and how they approached the work like research + songwriting.

Jesse discusses the freedom (and burdens) of being an indie artist—being able to release songs quickly, but also dealing with predatory label offers, maintaining authenticity, and resisting encouragement to “sell out.”

They also talk about AI and how it can mimic songwriting, prompting questions about what “authentic” artistry becomes when algorithms can generate music in seconds. The conversation veers into deeper territory—Jesse and Joe talk about war, human nature, entertainment vs. news media, corporations profiting off health and lives, and how culture narrates all of this.

Partial Transcript:

Joe Rogan: First of all, how long have you been doing music?

Jesse Welles: I think most of my life, you know?

JR: Did you grow up in a musical family or is it just something you picked up on your own?

JW: No, everyone worked and made art when they weren’t working. But no music, really. But I liked it. I like music.

JR: Like what kind of art did your family do?

JW: Like my mom would always paint. She put like murals on the walls of the house and stuff. And my old man’s a mechanic. And he would be tinkering around Making all sorts of fun stuff usually with his welder and whatnot. So I there’s I felt like they were artistic folks You know, but they didn’t they didn’t necessarily do music, you know, they’re smarter than that.

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JR: I only know of you from the videos that you put up on Instagram Yeah, specifically I think it was the United Healthcare guy was the first one. Yeah, right Which was really good dude. It’s the lyrics you in the timing of it all you captured the moment and That song to me was like yeah, that’s what the fuck is going on, right? That’s what’s really going on they don’t give a shit about you and they’re just trying to make money and That’s why when this guy got shot there was this reaction from people Yeah, which is very rare when someone gets assassinated when people celebrate right when someone’s not like a mass murder or something it was bizarre it was business it’s it’s i mean it must mean something is if people are celebrating yes somebody’s death yes something is wrong and all kind across both sides of the aisle it’s not a political thing it is a human thing they’re like these people they take your fucking money you pay them and then when something comes up you don’t get covered. And there doesn’t seem to be any repercussions and to fight it you have to go to court…

JW: The system would have to be revolutionized. I mean, you can’t have health for profit at that point. You’d have to socialize the medicine at that point.

JR: Yeah, which I agree with. Up until a point…

JW: All I mean is that you just don’t want to have to go to an urgent care and it costs $500 to get a pack of antibiotics.

JR: 100%. Well, that’s a giant scam.

JW: So, and, but that’s, that’s a scam that so many folks are stuck in, you know.

JR: That’s only part of the scam. You know, the healthcare scam, it goes so deep. There’s so many different layers to this fucking horrible den of vampires. Right. You know, cause it’s… Whenever you can make profit off of people and you’re involved in a corporation and then the corporation has an interest for its stockholders want more money every year. They want more money every quarter. So that’s what they try to do. That’s their focus. And when you’re doing that with people’s lives and people’s health like that, that should be illegal. That’s where it gets fucked.

JW: I suppose that’s why folks were, you know, it was upsetting to see. You know, I felt like I actually had kind of an unpopular opinion about it. And that, you know, why are we celebrating somebody’s death? Like, that seems far out. To celebrate the murder of somebody with a gun?

JR: Not only that, I believe unrelated to him and his case.

JW: Like, I mean, how far out is that? And so I didn’t want, you know, I’d… I make these tunes, but that one in particular, I was like, how do I even, how do I address this? What do you even say?

JR: So how do you approach something like that? Do you sit down with a pad and pen or do you start writing? Like, how do you start singing?

JW: Step one is avoid the work. So I went for, you know, some long jogs. I wrote a song about… Amazon instead and put up like Amazon is Santa Claus and I kept sitting there and it kept getting you know the situation was snowballing with the United Healthcare thing and I was like okay you gotta write and at that point it’s it’s a research project you know let’s write let’s write 2,000 words so that we can have 300 to sing and boil down the essence of the issue and make it rhyme and and put a jolly tune behind it that’s really that’s that’s kind of how that that goes about that sounds like super similar stand-up comedy yeah you boil it down yeah yeah yeah get every and i and you don’t it’s just punch lines so find the punch line of everything find the punch line of everything i never had the attention span to tell too much of a story or anything like that so i like i i like just keeping it in punchlines so i always like you know Mitch Hedberg and and Stephen Wright we’re so good at we’re so good at that just come out and lay out a bunch of punchlines yeah if.

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JR: I don’t know of anyone else I’m sure there probably is a few people out there that I missed but I don’t know of anybody else who takes Things that are in the zeitgeist these big stories that come up Yeah And turns them into a catchy tune and does it in a way where you’re you laid out? You know really the problem and the whole thing like you said in punchlines.

JW: Yeah, I you know There’s a lot. There’s a lot of folks doing it right now and and more every day but there was i mean there’s a precedent for that kind of work especially as far as like Woody Woody Guthrie was really the i was reading i was reading a Woody Guthrie biography And, my old man was in the hospital. He had just had a heart attack, and we didn’t know, like, what way it was gonna go or whatever. Anyway, I don’t know, just seeing him all hooked up to that stuff and thinking, if he were, if he died, I’ve hardly had any time to even know him. He’s hardly had any time to know anything. We don’t get very long down here, and I’m reading this… This Woody Guthrie biography, and I was just like, oh, I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna do, I’m gonna do this, I’m, you know, I’m gonna sing the, sing the news, because that’s really what, what Woody was kind of, was kind of doing in his day, because there was, there’s folk music around him, and he’d team up with Pete Seeger, and he was on radio programs, and he could have played, he had the, he had the choice, he could have played standards, he could have played country western music and stuff like that but he liked Making folks laugh and he liked telling it how it was…

JW: I mean, maybe he was riding on trains and boxcars and stuff. There’s no telling what they were hauling around and that sort of thing. But he, you know, he played the political tunes. He, he, I don’t, and maybe he’s a continuation of, of a longstanding human tradition of like bards going from town to town and singing the news. I don’t know. Maybe there’s some medieval dude going around singing about the king, you know, and I don’t know, but maybe, maybe. Maybe they’re white or just because I don’t like I don’t know if it’s a uniquely American tradition. But when I do it, I like to I get romantic about it and kind of think of it as uniquely American tradition because you got the freedom to do it. Right. And no one’s gunning me down in the field there or anything for anything I say, you know. So I get to, you know.

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JW: Religions get weirder and weirder. I don’t, like, in America, they get weirder and weirder kind of the more West we went, the more we manifest destiny out. Because, like, you have, like, Puritan pilgrims land in, you know, in New England, and the weirdest of them move a little bit more West, or they just go to, the Quakers just go to, like, Nantucket, you know. To be on an island and be isolated. But, you know, eventually, in about 100 years, you’ve got Mormons. Yep. You know? And then give it another 100-something years, then you’ve got Scientology out in California. Right?

JR: Have you seen American Primeval? The Netflix series? No. It’s really good. Really good. And it’s about, you know, the settling of the West, but a big part of it is the Mormons. Right. And how fucking Gangster the more we think of Mormons as being like it’s really sweet people like uh-uh no not back then no no no no.

JW: No nothing nothing was in the West man yeah it was it was death and car like i don’t know i i imagine it like blood meridian like like McCarthy’s book where basically you know like follows a story like this kid who goes on a scalping mission you know where their their job is to go down into Guadalajara and then come up in through the States and they just they scalp pretty much everyone they meet indiscriminately and then take those scalps back for dough it’s you know for a bounty which is crazy… Like in McCarthy’s book, at least, which follows the Glanton gang, I’m pretty sure at times they kill some of their own gang, just because they were dark-haired… Which is essentially what the wild West was yeah and then you you offer up eight thousand dollars every time you kill a person yeah oh you can get rid of people people quick and you’re gonna have the wildest of the wild are gonna go out there and tame that land man the craziest of the crazy yeah and that’s essentially calls them calls them out… I wonder if things are you know, probably seem a lot cleaner as far as chaos and bloodshed Now in the continental US and the Union and stuff but who is sending Folks to go do that abroad, you know to protect the homeland, you know under the under the auspices of Protecting the homeland doing the exact same thing. I really think we we we stay this as much as has changed and and we can measure that We could totally camp. I think also we stay the same, you know.

JR: Well until we’re forced to change and that until something or until we recognize the need to change collectively Yeah, but there has to be a discussion of it. It’s not something that just organically happens You know.

JW: I think of like Do you ever see, This is Hollywood, but Apocalypse Now? There’s Francis Ford Coppola. It’s got like Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper and Robert Duvall and all those cool cats and dope movie But it’s written on this premise of a of a book that was written in like 1899 by Joseph Conrad like heart of darkness. Heart of darkness was talking about a conquest of i believe the Dutch i’m not sure into the congo and some atrocities and stuff that were happening there treating people as subhuman and i don’t know if there was i don’t know if there was scalping or anything but i think that there was slavery and that sort of thing but coppola was able to adapt that and then put the Vietnam War as the new premise Going into, I think they, I think Sheen’s mission in the movie at least was to go upriver into Cambodia or Laos, I’m not sure which, and take out a rogue U.S. General who had basically enslaved a population of indigenous there. All that to say, I wonder if, like in Vietnam, if the folks fighting out there felt like in that moment, in that moment where you’re killing somebody, if you realize at that point that nothing has ever changed and that there’s something primeval in man. With this violence that this violence is innate or you know is this violence innate is it is this how? Folks are and there’s no helping it and there’s nothing that’s ever gonna change it because you can get kind of cynical that way or And I and I kind of tend on this more idealistic and at times it seems naive or stupid to have an ideal that folks can Could live in harmony and peace without taking one another’s lives, you know?

JR: The problem is they’ve never done it before.

JW: That’s mind-boggling. Because it is in all, I think it’s in a lot of us, deep down.

JR: Well, it has to be. Because that’s the only way we survived. That’s the only way we got to where we are today. Right. Because we existed before language. We existed before. Empathy before we understood each other before we communicate Yeah Any being that you didn’t know from somewhere else wanted what you had and they would try to take it by force So the bigger stronger one survived and that’s why the best genetics kept going and going and going I mean it was survival of the fittest that exists in nature and exists with humans and that’s the basis of our DNA Unfortunately, like that’s how we started right and so that the way it manifests itself today is fucking drone warfare, right? …

JR: And most war today is about resources. Most war today is about controlling parts of the world where there’s an infinite amount of money in the ground, whether it’s oil or now it’s rare earth minerals and stuff they need for batteries. And that’s what a lot of it is. I mean, that’s what a lot of conflict is in this world. And that’s gross. It’s scary. It’s scary. But. If you ask the average person, like, what are the odds that there will be no more war in your lifetime? And they’ll say 0%.

JW: It’s so far out. It’s just, like, I think, you know, the folks that go to war, like, if you signed up and went to Iraq and, you know, and like, oh, oh, three, oh, six, you know, and you’re securing. Or maybe not Iraq, but you’re going to

Afghanistan and you’re securing opium fields and stuff. And you’re out there, you’re risking your life. You got the gun on. You are prepared to take somebody’s life. But for what? And like… What are you asking? We’ll fight. It seems like for the sake of, just for the sake of the hunt or something like that.

JR: Well, if you ask the soldiers when they’re signing up, hey, do you want to go to

Afghanistan and guard Poppyfield? They’ll be like, what? No, I want to fight terrorism, motherfucker. I want to stop the people that did 9-11 from doing it again. That’s why a lot of people signed up. But then the reality kicks in once you’re standing around Poppyfields with a machine gun. And you’re like, oh. Yeah. Oh, this is a scam. You’re right. You know, I don’t know how much Internet access they had while they were over there, but if they did and they ever Googled what percentage of all heroin comes from Afghanistan, the answer they would have got is 94%. Yeah. They would have been like, wait. What is this?

JW: But then it takes a larger, it takes essentially a PSYOP in order to get men to fight for the interests of the people who are performing the PSYOP.

JR: Yes. You have to create a PSYOP. That puts a narrative out there that makes it noble for us to be doing what we’re doing.

JW: Noble. We’re such suckers. Yeah. It’s a noble cause. What’s more noble than letting somebody live?

JR: You know, everybody has their own little thing, their little realm they’re trying to conquer.

JW: Right. And it feels great.

JR: No, I don’t think it does.

JW: You don’t think it feels great to kick ass at something? Well. I mean, you want, like, I think. The pursuit of excellence. Yeah. Like, the most joy-rendering thing that there is.

JR: That aspect of it. You know? The aspect of crushing your enemies. I wonder how much.

JW: Well, you don’t have to, Like, I don’t. This thing is like. Playing guitar or something, I don’t have an enemy.

JR: But you’re an artist. You’re not a corporation. Are you an LLC yet? Did you sign up for the devil’s deal? What is, oh. Limited liability corporation. A lot of people do, so.

JW: I don’t have a record deal, if that’s what you’re saying.

JR: No, no, no, no. When you start making money, they tell you to form an LLC.

JW: What is it going to do?

JR: You become like a little corporation. And that way you pay yourself from the corporation. You can lease a car from the corporation.

JW: That’d be kind of cool.

JR: You’ll probably have to do that someday, eventually.

JW: I’ll be in a corporation.

JR: Maybe after this podcast, you’ll have to do that. I’ll be. Call it bottomless wells.

JW: I, I, that’s the most fun, and it does seem like it is what, anytime you’re in a hard place or anything like that mentally, yeah, like, the best way out is, like, find something to try to get good at, or try some, you know, and then try your best at it. Yeah. And it just seems innate.

JR: I think so.

JW: Like, no matter what it is.

JR: Right, but. The problem is if that thing is making money, then it gets weird, right? Like if your whole thing you’re good at and you try to get better at is just making money, that’s when things get really early. Because the same thing that makes you really good at writing songs could make another person look really good at being a psychopath. Because the best way to make money is to be completely feelingless and not give a shit about who this is going to impact. Ship all those jobs Overseas. Look how much money we’re going to make. Do this to that. Fuck all the And if we don’t. Take care of this in environmental pollutant and we just like let it leak out. We save X amount of money Right do that right then that’s that’s where things get weird You figure out the best way to make money like you’re really good at making money and that becomes your creativity You get really creative about moving around the law in order to make money you get really creative about how you Establish relationships with people how you can you know, make sure that laws are passed that favor what you’re doing And that’s a strange art very weird art

JW: That’s a dark art…

[Philantropic]

JR: You nailed it. That’s, that’s philanthropic capitalism right there. Dude. In a song.

JW: It’s far out.

JR: That’s a great song.

JW: It shouldn’t be allowed.

JR: It shouldn’t be allowed. Well, it shouldn’t be that easy to trick people.

JW: Who believes it? That’s why I’m just… I’m like, who in the hell would… think that this is… Good things happen because of it, but more bad things happen than good a lot of the time. And you’re holding an entire nation hostage or an entire group of people hostage by lending them money. Well, that’s not freedom.

JR: No, no.

JW: You gotta be free.

JR: Yeah, it’s real weird. Because there’s certain people that are like genuine philanthropists, but even them, when you’re donating money to specific organizations and you find out that most of their money goes to overhead, most of their money goes to employee salaries, which are ridiculously high, and you go, oh, this is a scam.

___

JW: Do you know Tom Hanks?

JR: Tom Hanks, the actor? Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know him personally.

JW: Oh, okay. I just wonder if every once in a while, when the government needs to explain something… To the public in a way that puts us in the best light if they commission a movie through Hollywood and stick Tom Hanks in it man he’s just explained so much to us over the years with Charlie Wilson’s war it’s like here’s how the saving private house how this this goes you know forrest gump is kind of a nostalgia fest about the you know Vietnam War. It kind of makes light of it.

JR: Well, my friend Sam was telling me, my friend Sam Tripoli was telling me that, and I had heard this, that during World War I, they had a problem that soldiers were not shooting at the enemy. They didn’t want to kill them. They didn’t want to be there. And so they were firing their guns but not even aiming them at the enemy. Right. So to combat this, they started making movies. And then in the movies, these war movies, the soldiers would shoot the enemy and they were like really heroes. And so then in World War II, people were much more willing to shoot the enemy. isn’t that crazy? Yeah, like so the intelligence communities have been deeply involved in moviemaking from the very beginning Because back then movies were the most powerful narrative in all of society Right and there was no counter narrative not not to speak of nothing that went glow and nothing with global or even that was like Publicly mass distributed there was nothing you might have people in coffee shops Saying hey man, I read this and this and that right there were small groups of people Most people were in the dark

JW: Even if you had a counter-narrative You’d be like Pete Seeger and get like blacklisted in the 50, you know musician you be

JR: or Smedley Butler, you’re right, who was in a the end of his career?

JW: Yeah It’s a wonder he survived his own his own tell-all there with war is a racket. Yeah, so It is. It didn’t seem to do a whole lot. Whatever.

___

JW: What, the politicians really controlled by like three main things, like special interests, donor class, and multinational corporations. So anybody who looks like they’re disentangled from any of those things is looking pretty appealing… Polls are just made so that news people have something to talk about. Well. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re the ones. Well, they probably are. They probably go to the poll center and they say, run this poll because I got to have something to talk about on Wednesday… I think the news is an incredibly lucrative business. It’s an entertainment business. There’s not news every day. There’s nothing. And they got to run 24 hours… They’re making up news. They should call it the old. Because it’s always the same shit happening, man. Like, it’s not even… I feel like the public has to understand that at the end of the day, these guys are, whether they believe it or not, this is entertainment. These guys are entertainers. Yeah. Like, this isn’t the new, they’re telling you stuff, they’re feeding it to you, and you gotta take things with a big-ass grain of salt because this stuff is, these are entertainers.

___

JR: This one that you did on philanthropy that affects the narrative is there’s everyone’s like throwing their coins into this big pile and trying to figure this out and it more so now than i think has ever happened at any time in human history there’s more discussion it’s just yeah we’re so upset that it’s not fixed and It it’s on its way in the right direction.

JW: I think it’s just not Satisfying the pace that would in which progress is happening Everybody can get on now, too I mean like that’s it’s just like I’d prop up my iPhone and like play a tune Everyone can just like get and yep phone in front of their face and like get it out there, you know Yeah.

JR: Yeah, anyone can now Which is great. I mean, this allows guys like you to just all of a sudden have a following. You know, all you have to do is have some talent, some talent, some creativity, some hard work. Bam. There you go. It’s kind of cool. I mean, that’s the beautiful side of social media.

JW: That’s good. There’s no rules as far as, especially in the music industry and stuff, there’s no rules anymore. Anyone who tells you that they know what to do or that they know what they’re doing, they’re so full of shit, dog. Nobody knows what they’re doing.

JR: Yeah.

JW: And like we want people to know because we want to ask like what could I do to, you know, to be successful or whatever. Then nobody knows. No. Nobody knows and there’s no gatekeepers or anything like that. All you have to do is want to play music.

JR: Yeah.

JW: And then go and do it on your phone and see if anyone likes you. And if they like you, you know, that’s good. Yeah. Then everybody will come to you and say, I know how to make this bigger. And they don’t know what they’re talking about either.

JR: No, generally they’re vampires, and they’re trying to take a piece. Yeah. They’re trying to clamp on to you.

JW: Oh, they come out of the woodwork.

JR: Have you had people offer you a bunch of money?

JW: Not a bunch, but they’ll offer you a little for a lot.

JR: Yeah, a little for a lot. They want your future, right?

JW: Yeah. They’ll go, you know, there are all sorts of folks in the early days. Coming through labels and stuff going, here’s, we’ll give you 10 grand for like 30 songs or something like that. And it’s like, this is insulting. Yeah. I don’t want any of this. I don’t want any, I don’t need any of this.

JR: Oliver Anthony was going through that right after Rich Men from Richmond. Right. Richmond, North of Richmond, a song came out. Like they just came after him with all this money.

JW: Oh, they will.

JR: All this fucking promises.

JW: They will. It’s me. They give you so much up front and you don’t even like if you don’t know it’s just a big-ass loan that you’re never gonna Recoup and then you’re not even you’re not living off your own dough at that point You know living off of borrowed money like everybody else in the States and you’re attached to them forever Yeah, you’re attached to them for I just they own your masters. You’ll never see it back I mean, I assigned to a label when I was like 22. I’ve been through that all that

JR: How old are you now?

JW: I’m 47

JR: Are you really?

JW: No, I’m going to be 33 this year.

JR: I believed you. I was like, man, kid’s living good. No.

JW: No, I’m just joshing you.

JR: But, you know, this is a new time where you really can become hugely successful and get a gigantic following with no one attached to you.

JW: Yeah.

JR: You don’t have to have all those people. They’re not going to help you.

JW: No, they don’t. Too many cooks in the kitchen. Way too many people wanting to find out.

JR: And too many people eating at the dinner plate.

JW: And, dude, whenever anybody gives you money, like if the label comes in, let’s say Chris took, let’s say he took the deal, you know, or whatever. If Oliver Anthony took the big deal. Then he’s got all these people up there in the office with tax write-off MacBooks telling him what to do with his music because they opened their wallet. Yeah. And they’re going to have to give you notes. Yeah. They’re entitled. Give you their opinion at that point and you wouldn’t be able to just do whatever the hell he wants to do Yeah You know and I think it’s so important for artists to be able to do whatever the hell they want to do because that’s the Only way that can be themselves exact and then that’s the only way you can be successful is to completely be yourself at all times 100%.

JR: Nothing but yourself and you see that one thing that does happen when people do take the money is that part goes away Because even though you think you’re kind of sort of being yourself. Everybody knows You’re not.

JW: Totally you’re not totally being yourself anymore and dough will change your life in a in a in a way that that you might not like be ready for something it’s gonna you’re gonna think i got this dough now i can i can leave this town i don’t like or i can get the house that i was wanting when it was really it was being in that town and kind of having things difficult pressures around you and stuff that was creating these diamonds. That was putting you in this situation to make good art and stuff like that. Yeah. And you take away all your discomfort and then realize you can’t make art and you’re not happy. And then you start getting nostalgic about the good old days when you were broke and shit like that. It’s better to just take only what you need.

JR: Well, then there’s also the problem once you become successful of worrying about not being successful anymore. About maintaining it.

JW: That’s terrifying. Sure.

JR: I’ve got to keep this going. I can’t fall off. I can’t be less successful. I used to be poor, and now I’ve got money. I’ve got to make sure this doesn’t go away. It’s how you measure. You temper your thoughts, and you’re measured in what you say.

JW: No, your measure of success is how much can I be myself and be happy. Be happy that way if you can still be 100% yourself all the way to the end of the line, then that’s your success Yeah, like that’s but that’s a smart way of looking at things Most people look at things in terms of like what is the way that’s the most profitable, you know, so they’ll avoid certain Controversy, but we know that like we know even from talking about like people whose business whose art is money It creates misery to be chasing the bank account to constantly have the dough, you know? Like, you create a wake of… You create bad art, all right? Your albums start to suck. You might be getting in bigger, bigger places and stuff like that, but yeah, it’s gonna fall off, and when it does, you know, then you have, like, some existential problems to deal with at that point.

___

JW: It’s always it’s fun to think back on that like when I was When I was 18, I did a radio program for KDYN, Real Country Radio, every Saturday morning. It was called Dial-A-Deal, where people call in. It was basically like an on-air Craigslist, you know. But I was alone at the station after football games. You know, football game would be like Friday night. Go to bed all beat up. Wake up at like 5 a.m. Go into the station, record the obituaries real quick, because those are going to run on. On Saturday and then and then do like a you know an on-air Craigslist radio program and you’re just like 17 years old with the entire radio station to yourself you know wow I was a total dumbass too I could have been like anyway here’s Grand Funk Railroad you know but did you have a specific list of things you’re supposed to play the list was like programmed in and then you had to record weather, so you would Pull up the National Weather Service on the screen and then you would record yourself doing the weather saying, you know, winds are going to be southeast, south, southeast, northwest, out at 15 miles an hour or whatever. You do the obituaries. But, no, you didn’t actually DJ. It was just like, you would hit the space bar, music would start playing and be like, Okay, folks, if you can’t tell by the music, I’ll go ahead and tell you myself it’s time for Dial-A-Deal. Remember, our numbers up here are 667-4567 or… Toll free at 888-325-KDYN. That’s 888-325-KDYN. Remember, no commercial real estate advertisement.

Please limit your calls to once per program. And keep in mind, I can’t always keep track of these numbers up here myself. So if you remember them on your end, you’re doing me and you a favor. Let’s get back to the dialing and a dealing. And then people would call in and they’d be like, I’m looking for my dog. And I’d be like, somebody find that dog. And then, you know, list off their number. Or, uh…

JR: Did you ever play any of your songs?

JW: No. No, it was a classic country radio station. So I’m up there listening to, like, Willie, Waylon, Hank Sr., Hank Jr.

And then, also, they were playing, they were playing, like, some modern, like, I remember Brad Paisley was being played on there, and he just shredded. But, no, I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I was in a grunge band at the time. I couldn’t play. Wait, really? Yeah. I think that, yeah.

I couldn’t put… Once I printed out the track listing for the record that I had made, I would make CD records and sell them at school, like five bucks a pop. I made more money selling records in high school than I ever did as an adult.

I printed out all the song listings. Anyway, the album was called Mom, I’m Gay. And I left a bunch of them at the radio station.

I remember the guy who was running it, he came to me and he was like, did you print these out are these yours and it’s just kind of awkward after that but a small town in Arkansas kind of far out that’s funny but i you know folks folks will let a let a young person do all kinds of stuff i guess they see an aptitude in you they trust you so they let you drive a limo you know they just needed a job they needed someone to do the job.

JR: It’s that simple and most people would only temporarily keep that job and they would leave right?

JW: Yeah, hi turnover Yeah, yeah, there’s high turnover at the radio station because we were making a dough right, you know the do here was this this was in 1927 2010 I knew a lot of radio when I was young and doing the road.

JR: So I’d do like morning radio shows in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. And it was the only way to promote things. Like say if you’re going to do some gig in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, like you get on local radio. You tell everybody drive time radio. So you’re on the air. It’s like 630 in the morning. Yeah. And let everybody know you’re gone. Radio was a weird thing, man, because it was like a local connection. And all that stuff is kind of gone now. You know, local connection used to be fun. There was something about listening to the local radio in the morning when you’re on your way to work. It was kind of cool. It was great. And you knew that most of your friends were listening too. Right.

___

JW: Tomorrow i’ll announce a tour and i think it’s like 20 something dates and then i’ll go out for two months and and play you know.

JR: You just play solo?

JW: No, I bring a band.

JR: Oh, that’s cool. I got a whole band.

JW: And then right now I’ve just been in festival season, so I just played the Newport Folk Fest. Shout out, Newport.

JR: Do you do any of these songs, like United Health?

JW: Oh, yeah.

JR: You do all of them?

JW: Yeah.

JR: Nice.

JW: Because I’m just always putting out albums. Yeah, like on Friday I’ll put out another record, too.

JR: How many albums do you have so far?

JW: Like five or six. I wrote like… 100 songs in ’24 and just like put them all out and that’s what’s great about being indie is like you can just put out music as soon as you make it right. So there’s but there’s a lot of tunes to choose from right usually You know on the set I’ll play a lot of these topical ones and then bring the band up and then we’ll play the other records that I got. But, it’s just that, Newport and then we did Edmonton Folk Fest and here in a little bit I’ll do Farm Aid And Healing Appalachia. Farm Aid was like last year around this time John Cougar Mellencamp sent me an email and was like Jesse I would like you to play at Farm Aid, but it was from a weird email address and I didn’t believe it was him but it it was totally him just like emailing through his like girlfriend’s email or something hilarious and so i like i showed it to to one of the like one of my friends he has managed and he’s like i’ll vet this out we’ll see if this is legit and sure enough it was anyway go down to Farm Aid and that’s like one of the first gigs that I play as this iteration of myself. But I got to meet a lot of cool people and get to be friends with a lot of them too. Lucas Nelson, it was very cool to meet him last year, and now I think we’ll be doing a tune together here before too long.

JR: Nice.

JW: Him I got to meet Charlie over there at Farm Aid, Charlie Crockett….

JR: I’m gonna send this to Jamie because you you you hear it and you’re like, oh my god This could be a fucking giant hit and the crazy thing is that AI makes this in seconds, right? I mean in literal seconds like you watch this guy put in the prompts you watch it Make this song and then you listen to the song and you’re like, right Oh my god, and it’s better than most of these songs like listen to this, Create a square avatar of a fictitious female alternative slash indie singer and a name for her. Wow. Sadie Winters. Sadie Winters. Okay. The song is about walking away from someone who never really saw her worth. She was going to create the song lyrics. Look at that. Wait, how many seconds was that?

JW: That was like about four seconds.

JR: Look at that.

JW: That’s got a bridge.

JR: Did you even read any of these? You don’t care. I don’t care. Put my lyrics in. The lyrics that happen in four seconds. Yes.

JW: And then hit create let’s listen this is the world premiere she’s a good singer good fan that’s nice pretty good where are we Rick where have we found ourselves.

JR: How crazy is that? Look at that. Jewel even says, Jewel goes, wow, it’s a great melody.

JW: Listen, artists, everything that can be replaced will be replaced. Okay? And pop music was already AI. Patrick has a great point there. I don’t think artists, what you’re making, I don’t think you got nothing to worry about.

JR: Well, it’s not a worry. It’s… I mean, for some people, I’m sorry to worry, but it also is just a concern that there’s a new element of society, that there’s creativity is being replaced in at least a form in front of our eyes. Like, regardless of what you think about pop music, there are some people that are making pop music as a creative endeavor. And that just did it way better than they do and did it like that.

JW: They’ll have to find something else to do.

JR: They’ll have to find something else to do.

JR: All things that can be replaced will be replaced…

https://podcasts.musixmatch.com/podcast/the-joe-rogan-experience-01hp4c6gdxz064yk1cyc1qym1k/episode/2367-jesse-welles-01k31x2xncng91p4rz1z95pxf0

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/

TikTok folk hero Jesse Welles: “I’m trying to find a through-line that’s honest”

NME meets the Arkansas singer-songwriter who’s become a viral sensation by “singing the news”, delivering songs about Gaza, capitalism, tariffs and United Healthcare in bite-sized videos on social media

Jesse Welles looks into his phone, fiddling with it for a moment as blue skies and early spring sunshine fight to be seen over his shoulder. Once he’s settled, a green expanse comes into view behind him, the light clipping the surface of a body of water. Anyone who’s kept track of his rise to viral fame as a folk firebrand for the TikTok crowd might expect his guitar to swoop into the frame next, followed by a short, sharp song that dissects the grim realities of modern America.

But on this day in April, he’s not wandering the woodland around his Arkansas home with something to get off his chest. Instead of an acoustic, he’s clutching a gas station coffee cup, standing on the side of the road during a long drive between Fort Collins, Colorado and Dallas, Texas. Welles is on a North American tour, having spent a couple of weeks transposing those star-making tracks from wilderness musings into the sort of polemics that can unite a packed room in real time. What’s it been like, putting faces to the thousands of names littering the comments sections beneath videos of him “singing the news”? “It’s like meeting a pen pal or something,” he tells NME.

Welles, a shaggy-haired 30-year-old out of Ozark (population 3,000 and change), has logged enough hours in the music biz to take this latest twist in his stride. Since the world first heard his weatherbeaten voice more than a decade ago, he’s been a few different things: a prolific solo artist under the name Jeh Sea Welles, the frontman of groups called Dead Indian and Cosmic-American, and a major label prospect as simply Welles, whose 2018 album ‘Red Trees and White Trashes’ first threatened to get him over. That it didn’t was almost a mortal blow.

But second, third and fourth chances can be found in unusual places. Burned out on touring and feeling like he’d swung hard and missed, Welles installed TikTok on his phone on a whim in late 2023. Keeping things low stakes at first, he fooled around by uploading snippets of original writing alongside covers of formative songs by Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Grateful Dead. But after his father had a heart attack, it all shifted.

His process became more deliberate as he began fashioning the events of the day, in all their dispiriting glory, into prickly folk numbers. Welles was working through the emotions of seeing a parent in need, and used these songs as a complementary means to think over the madness and anxiety of a society clinging, white-knuckled, onto the precipice. “It really is just me making sense of it,” he says.

Often standing amid rippling leaves and snaking power lines in a manner that suggested grounding – not only in a tradition, but on soil that will outlive any headline – Welles has delivered verses about Gaza, about the ghoulish nature of corporate healthcare, about Signal leaks. “If players in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s had to rely on a 45 in order to get their record out,” Welles says, “my 45 was the 90-second reel.”

Welles’ new approach struck a chord in a big way. As his likes and follower numbers climbed into the millions at a dizzying clip, he was held up by listeners as a protest singer in the vein of Dylan, Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie. “I suppose folks will compare you to what they are familiar with,” he says, downplaying that sort of talk. “The only way any artist is ever going to make it is to be completely themselves,” he considers. “It was a road to Damascus moment, a bright light that hit. I realised I don’t need to be anybody but what I want to be.”

From the outside, though, the process of “singing the news” seems like hard graft: doom-scrolling fashioned into a creative pursuit and, eventually, a living that requires Welles stay switched on. But he doesn’t see it that way. “I’ve always paid attention to the news,” he says. “It was always on when I was a kid. Really, what you’re looking at is me trying to get to the root of what is going on. There’s a lot of pretense, a lot of performance and manipulation, that goes into broadcasting what we call the news. So, I’m trying to find a through-line that’s honest.”

The opening song on Welles’ latest record ‘Middle’ takes this philosophy and spins it into three minutes of chiming folk-rock. ‘Horses’ dates back to one of Welles’ earliest TikTok experiments; he played it in his late-night television debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in March. Its chorus finds him “singing this song about loving all the people that you’ve come to hate”. Locating a sting in the tail of some boilerplate hippie talk, he draws attention to the chasm that exists between left and right on every topic of consequence. It’s in that empty space that Welles has set out his stall.

“Most likely the path is down the middle,” he says. “When you do decide that’s going to be the way through living, then it poses the question, ‘Well, how will I alleviate the discomfort that comes with riding down the middle?’ If I’ve decided that that is the path that’s the most honest, well, the salve or the balm that you’re going to have to apply is love, in order to not lose your mind there, or not be tempted to join a tribe.”

‘Horses’, though, is one of relatively few songs with a political bent on ‘Middle’. Instead, the record serves up material that is more personal, even esoteric, and founded upon collaboration with a band. That the album was dropped in tandem with ‘Under The Powerlines’ – a monster project containing 60 examples of his backwoods writing, their titles accompanied by recording dates for maximum context – only seemed to highlight the difference in approach.

“I’m always writing both [kinds of songs],” Welles observes. “I’ve got my tunes that are near to me, that are me exploring what it means to be alive, and then there are the tunes of me trying to make sense of the news, or at least trying to make it rhyme. ‘Middle’ is a collection of tunes that I was working on for myself. It’s my jazz, you know?”

Taking in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, London and Dublin, Welles’ ongoing European tour is a chance to see how his jazz reverberates a few thousand miles from home. The tour has been sold out since February, underlining the universal desire to see their confusion and anger channelled into song. “Dylan was probably more liked over there than he was at home,” Welles says with a laugh. “And that’s just the way life goes – you’ll never be cool in your hometown.”

But he can also admit there’s more to it than that. The American lineage that the comments section sees him in is mirrored by protest music of equal and greater potency in every country where six strings have been pulled tight across a couple of planks of wood. “Globally and historically, that’s where I become intrigued,” Welles says. “More than an American tradition, I think it’s a human tradition: writing and finding the truth, teasing it out of the wool.”

TikTok folk hero Jesse Welles: “I’m trying to find a through-line that’s honest” By Huw Baines, May 6th 2025
https://www.nme.com/features/music-features/jesse-welles-interview-album-middle-3860399