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.”
In the academy award winning Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, Timothèe Chalamet, (portraying Bob Dylan) suggests that to truly create something new, you have to destroy the past. The British writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch referred to this as “killing your darlings.” David Lowery of the band Cracker sings, in Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now) “What the world needs now is another folk-singer like I need a hole in my head.” The idea is that to create truly original art, literature, music, or cultural movements, you must forget the past.
Enter Jesse Welles. The 30-year-old, originally from Arkansas who has been making music for the last 15 years just released Middle, an album currently climbing the Americana charts. He lists what he calls “American Wordsmiths” like Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Mark Twain as influences for his lyrics. But instead of killing his darlings, he has used folk music to raise awareness for social change and express himself much like his 20th century counterparts. His voice has a Bob Dylan quality to it. His work is a bit like what you’d get if Woody Guthrie had a social media presence. Welles’ songs are intriguing, a call to action and anti-establishment but he’s using the tools of his day to send his message.
Prior to learning about Middle I had seen him on social media singing protest songs addressing 21st century problems. Oddly, other than some names and dates, his subjects aren’t a lot different from the folk music popularized by his darlings — poverty, excess, corporate greed, war, inequality, corrupt politicians and religious leaders among others. Though his songs would be perfect for outside of a Bernie Sanders rally, his Arkansas roots give him a perspective that transcends regions and the binary nature of politics.
In 2024 Welles released two full-length records and an EP as well as numerous singles and a collaboration with Mt. Joy covering the Creedence Clearwater Revival classic “Have You Ever Seen the Rain”? In February he received the 2025 John Prine Songwriter Fellowship at the Newport Folk Festival. He also released a 63-song album of his previous singles. If what you know about Jesse Welles is from his videos, you may expect him to be belting out protest tunes and playing acoustic guitar. While the folk spirit remains alive, Middle incorporates a full band for more highly produced, country-rock vibe. It was produced by Eddie Spear who has worked recently with Sierra Ferrell and Zach Bryan. In another parallel to Bob Dylan, Welles’ loyal fans aren’t particularly happy about this evolution. Some even called him a sellout.
From a political perspective, Middle, as the title suggests, has Welles trying to find some common ground. The title track which includes verses referencing Star Wars, Heart of Darkness, and the recent fires in California, revolves around the chorus “when the devil plays his fiddle, I’m gonna meet you in the middle, friend.”
He strikes a similar chord in the breakout single “Horses”. It could be compared sonically to Bob Dylan’s Hurricane. The gist however is that in spite of all that is tearing us apart we need to remember we’re all in it together. His hope is in the chorus “So I’m singing this song about loving, all the people that you’ve come to hate. It’s true that they say I’m gonna die someday. Why am I holding on to all this weight?”
Welles isn’t covering new ground here. He, like so many other great troubadours writes what he sees and speaks truth to power. But maybe what we need isn’t necessarily a new format. Maybe we do need another folk singer, maybe our darlings are still valid and, what musicians and writers and poets have been doing for centuries still works. It’s just that we sometimes need a fresh face to carry the message. At Farm-Aid in the early ‘90s, Arlo Guthrie introduced Tracy Chapman. He suggested that for every generation, someone needed to “hold the flashlight” and guide us. He said Tracy Chapman was the holder of the flashlight at that time. Jesse Welles seems well-positioned to hold the flashlight as we navigate the 21st century.
A buzzy protest song about the definition of war, timed perfectly to public protests against the Israel–Hamas War, shows that there’s room for social media and protest singers to coexist.
Last year, we saw the unlikeliest of pop stars emerge from the backwoods of Virginia with an acoustic-folk turn—a protest song that seemed to highlight the plight of the working man.
That song, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” played into a number of political talking points, found support from the right-leaning political establishment, and even appeared in a Republican presidential debate. (Its singer, Oliver Anthony, demurred from being on the right or left, but his song included a base-level commentary on welfare that made the song controversial with progressives.)
It topped the charts (partly with the help of a well-known iTunes gaming scheme), but within a few months, it had faded from memory. Oliver Anthony released an album recently, produced by Dave Cobb, the guy who has made albums by Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton, and Brandi Carlile sparkle. It was not a mega-hit when it came out (very few newly released albums are), but he’s still in the conversation.
I bring this up because there is now a musician strongly on the left who is drawing attention for a similar formula. Over the weekend, a guitarist named Jesse Welles, using a similar model to Anthony’s singing-outside-in-nature field-recording tactic, emerged from the murky waters of YouTube with an extremely timely critique of the Israel-Hamas War: [War Isn’t Murder]
The song’s message is direct and harsh, as highlighted by its title, “War Isn’t Murder.” However, it’s full of lyrical wordplay of the kind that someone who has been doing this a while usually comes up with. The whole idea of the song is to needle at the semantics that people use to discuss and paper over the nature of combat. (One look at Reddit suggests that at least some people did not understand that was the point of the song.)
Coming during a week when social media is loaded with stories about major U.S. universities trying to manage anti-war encampments on their campuses, often with police assistance, it feels like the song emerged at the very second something like it needed to come up. Putting aside whether you agree with the song, it feels like it emerged almost on the very day something like this was bound to enter the conversation.
On the surface, his song is very reminiscent of another famed (and controversial for its time) anti-war song, the 1965 hit “Eve Of Destruction,” which its singer, Barry McGuire, didn’t write, but infuses with a similar gravel-voiced directness.
Now, Jesse Welles (apparent birth name Jesse Wells, no additional e) seems like he came from nowhere to drop the timeliest of protest songs, but he really didn’t. Welles, who hails from Northwest Arkansas, has flowed through the waves of indie rock for roughly a decade, and has been featured by NPR in the past for his more rock-oriented sound. Over the years, he’s opened for big-name bands like Greta Van Fleet. Unlike Anthony, music was obviously his career before he made this song.
Artists like Welles often try out a few sounds, or launch new bands, until they find something that fits them. Welles’ new sound feels like John Prine more than Bob Dylan, but he’s talking about things that are of its moment, like he’s Phil Ochs. (Ochs, famously, sold himself as a “singing journalist” who sang songs directly inspired by stories in newspapers and magazines.) Welles is singing about fentanyl and microplastics, not Vietnam and the civil rights movement.
Since his sudden breakout, Anthony has carried himself like someone who tripped into this. By contrast, Welles feels like someone who has embraced this as a strategy, based on the fact that he has a TikTok full of songs like this.
But even if it’s strategic, it nonetheless feels like a conversation worth having.
Back in 2017, a Washington Post story, riffing off the fact that Lady Gaga (!) performed one of his songs, suggested that we needed a Phil Ochs, singing protest songs about what’s happening in the culture in real time.
At a time when a guy sounding like the second coming of John Prine can write up-to-the-minute protest songs and post them on YouTube and TikTok, I feel like there’s a chance we might be getting that.
Protest singers have long had the tools to respond to the culture in real time. With songs like “War Isn’t Murder,” they’re starting to use them.
Modern protest singer Jesse Welles blows Dallas away at sold-out Kessler show
Jesse Welles is something like a time-traveler. From his 70s-style hair to his poignant songwriting, to his poetic spirit that seems to be timeless—he is connecting people from all walks of life and at every age.
Last week, Welles completed his Fear is the Mind Killer Tour in the US, with his second-to-last stop being a sold-out show, “An Evening with Jesse Welles,” in Dallas at The Kessler Theater.
Welles is known for his confrontational and empathetic folk music, coupled with his mastery of guitar, rustic voice and bravery to tackle social issues. Beyond his polarizing political satire songs that has made him famous through social media, there is a deep well of soul-quenching lyricism throughout his discography.
In the past 12 months, the prolific songwriter has released 128 recorded songs, including three full-length studio albums, an EP, and a collection of 63 songs called Under The Powerlines (April 24 – September 24), from his social media videos.
At The Kessler, a notable detail that was a bit surprising to see upon arriving was the beefed up security at the venue, where a security guard had a metal detector to check for weapons. Immediately, it was a stark reminder that the nature of Welles’ work can come with consequences. But that hasn’t stopped the rising folk hero from using his voice.
His set in Dallas bobbed and weaved through his catalogue, kicking the crowd off hard with “Fat” straight into “Walmart,” both becoming the first of many sing-a-longs of the night. The cheers from the crowd at times were deafening, as Welles pulled Dallas into a pocket universe of his creation. The front row pressed up at the front of the stage looked to be mostly 20-somethings, though the crowd was littered with people of all ages–as his music penetrates multiple generations.
After some topical fan favorites like “Whistle Boeing,” “United Health,” and “Cancer,” Welles transitioned into some of his more personal tracks like “See Arkansaw” and “New Moon” from his sophomore album Patchwork. As he sang “Saint Steve Irwin,” there was a reverence in the air, as every eye and ear in the room was fixated on the stage. Lyrics like “I can see a light at the end of the tunnel / Then again it could be the train / I can work this out / Nothing’s holding me back / There’s hope on the horizon / Or maybe the Earth’s just flat” exemplifies Welles’ knack for taking words of olde and giving them new perspective.
There is a magic in the way Welles can play an uplifting cooing melody like “Turtles,” then perform a heart-wrenching rendition of his redemption song “Let It Be Me,” like someone who has weathered the worst of storms and is now laying their soul bare for a room full of familiar strangers.
An hour into the show, Welles ended the solo part of the set with fan-favorite “Bugs,” and then got his band on stage to perform for another whole hour. They kicked it off with “God, Abraham, and Xanax,” a song that juxtaposes biblical references with the modern human experience from his debut album Hells Welles. His provocative songwriting tackles many issues including religion and violence with songs like “War is a God,” which feels like a pacifist’s war-cry.
The band got the crowd dancing with “Domestic Error,” with a studio recording set to release this Wednesday, as a dual single release alongside “Red.” KXT fans may have recognized “Horses” at the show, which is currently in rotation at the station from Welles’ new album Middle.
The rocking title track for the tour, “Fear is the Mind Killer,” was the band’s last song before encore chants of “JESSE! JESSE! JESSE!” beckoned the artist back on stage to end with a couple solo songs, including “Middle.”
After the show, Welles popped up in the lobby to meet with fans and sign merch, emanating a quiet confidence with a humble demeanor & offering his time to people that connect with his frequency.
Jesse Welles feels like a breath of fresh air for a world choking on toxicity. His sold-out US and European tours affirm that there is something special to be found in his live performance. You can catch him on tour this festival season at May 17 at FreshGrass (Bentonville, AR), June 1 at Railbird Music Festival (Lexington, KY) and July 26 at Newport Folk Festival (Newport, RI).
The stunning success of American folksinger Jesse Welles testifies to the rich afterlife of authenticity.
Rather than hammering the last nail into its coffins, as many pundits feared, AI opened the lid.
Evidence of this increasingly forceful haunting abounds.
Despite the fact that social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok are full of professionally made and AI-generated content, relentlessly pushed at us by algorithms designed to reinforce mindless passive consumption, the posts people are most excited about sharing, the ones that go viral, disproportionately feature content that foregrounds what makes us human.
Cue the work of Jesse Welles.
The term “troubadour” has been thrown around far too often in relation to modern popular musicians. But he fits it better than most, especially now that he is touring to sold-out crowds, finding ways to make the most threadbare conventions feel fresh.
A talented rock musician who moved from Arkansas to the music-industry hotbed of Nashville, Tennessee, in the mid-2010s, Welles eventually returned home without having made it big.
In 2023, he decided on a different tack, recording short videos of himself playing cover songs on an acoustic guitar in natural settings around his home, such as the middle of the forest or the overgrown meadow made by a corridor of power lines. Then he began adding his own compositions to the mix.
The short clips Welles made from these solo sessions started blowing up on TikTok, driving traffic to his YouTube channel.
He is now popular enough to appear with a band on the ABC late-night show Jimmy Kimmel Live, promoting his new album Middle.
Welles appeals to a wide range of people, building on the recent surge of interest in Bob Dylan’s work inspired by the Timothée Chalamet biopic, A Complete Unknown. Baby Boomers and surviving members of the folk music-loving generation that preceded them find his stripped-down aesthetic comforting. But a surprisingly large number of teens and twenty-somethings are also drawn to it.
It helps that he regularly shares songs that critique the rich and powerful, devoting particular attention in recent months to the second Trump Administration’s assault on American institutions and Elon Musk’s break-things-before-you-make-things mindset.
“Signal Leak” is a humorous send-up of National Security Advisor Michael Waltz’s use of the popular messaging app to plan for a “secret” strike on Yemen.
One of Welles’ signature moves is to lure listeners in with lyrics so simple they sound like something appropriate for pre-schoolers, only to slip in double meanings with a savage edge.
His recent song “Red” is a particularly good example, highlighting Musk’s transformation from a visionary beloved of well-off liberals into a reactionary firebrand:
I got me a red house and a red car Runs on big red batteries They used to be blue Fifteen minutes ago But they turned red just for me
As the song unfolds, Welles keeps finding new ways to make the colour signify. He conjures the spectre of a bloody outcome to the current political crisis. Then he invokes the popular 1999 science-fiction film The Matrix to lampoon the concept of “red-pilling”, which reactionary conspiracy theorists derived from it, right after suggesting that Musk’s use of a Roman salute might have something to do with his love of “white powder”:
I got me some red pills And a bottle I got black and blue ones too All the pills are all the same The illusion is you choose
There are clear parallels between the viral explosion of Jesse Welles and that of Oliver Anthony, whose 2023 folk song “Rich Men North of Richmond” rode a wave of populist resistance to the apparent expansion of government reach in the wake of the pandemic.
Despite being celebrated by conservatives, Anthony insisted that he didn’t mean for the song to seem partisan. But the stereotypes he invokes suggest that they understood “Rich Men North of Richmond” better than he did.
Although Welles may be tapping into the same reservoir of populist sentiment that Oliver Anthony did, songs like “Red” make it abundantly clear that the rich men in his sights don’t just live north of Richmond or vote for Democrats, even if some of the people praising him mistake his homespun vibe for a message from the bygone America they dream of restoring.
A cynical person might point out that Jesse Welles is deceiving us.
After all, the solitude and sense of immediacy his clips communicate are illusions since he is connecting with thousands of people through them, using the technological mediation of deeply problematic platforms.
His rough-hewn performances can feel a bit like watching one of those mountaineering documentaries in which you marvel at the in-your-face spectacle of climbers defying death, only to remember that somebody had to lug a camera up to 8,000 metres and position it just so in order to capture them.
As the brutal satire of Elia Kazan’s brutal 1957 film A Face in the Crowd already communicated, the yearning to have a true man or woman of the people become a star is so deeply engrained within the American culture industry that we should be wary of anyone who finds favour with the insiders who program content for shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live.
But Welles has great answers for the sceptics.
Although he obviously isn’t composing his songs on the spot, the fact that so many of them are topical, in sync with the narrowing gyre of the news cycle, demonstrates his dedication.
The way he ends most videos, walking up to the camera to stop the recording instead of editing that part out, reinforces the ethos of his DIY approach.
Most importantly, Welles incorporates enough self-reflexivity into his songs to confirm awareness of its paradoxes.
He confronts it directly in “Will the Computer Love the Sunset?”, which he recently recorded in a parking garage. The lyrics worry that we will “midwife our demise” by giving machines too much power over us.
“Can it calculate my love? Will it know how to be kind? You can’t just rewind.” That last line does a wonderful job of distilling the way Welles confronts a world going mad.
He may be recording himself out in the middle of nowhere on a beat-up guitar. But he knows perfectly well that there is no going back.
Although the past may inspire us in our struggle to move forward, as the example of Bob Dylan clearly does for Jesse Welles, making real progress requires that we stop believing in the magic of repetition.
Jesse Welles Brings Country-Tinged ‘Horses’ To ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’
See the prolific singer-songwriter offer the opener off his new album, Middle.
Jesse Welles was the musical guest on Thursday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live. Welles performed “Horses” from his new album, Middle, which arrived on February 21.
A prolific songwriter, Jesse Welles has performed and released music under various names such as Jeh Sea Wells and simply Welles along with the groups Dead Indian and Comsic-American. Jesse Welles released two studio albums in 2024, Hells Welles and Patchwork, and now follows with Middle.
Welles selected Middle opener “Horses” to perform on Jimmy Kimmel Live. The song showcases Jesse’s signature songsmithery. Dave Matthews introduced him at Farm Aid 2024 as “one of the best songwriters I’ve ever heard in my life.” Known for his topical songs, “Horses” is a more macro, existential rumination.
If you need any further illustration of the creative explosion that Jesse Welles has been the catalyst and accelerant for over the last year or so, appreciate that he just released a 63-song album encapsulating a six month time period between April of 2024 to September of 2024 called Under The Powerlines. The title makes reference to the clearing where Welles recorded many of his now viral videos over that time period.
The album collects the audio from those viral videos that have garnered Jesse Welles 1.1 million followers on Instagram, 1.2 million followers on Tik-Tok, and 370,000 subscribers on YouTube, and counting. It’s difficult to impossible to communicate the incredible level of interest we’re seeing in Welles, which has also translated to the live space where he’s selling out shows left and right. Jesse Welles is one of the hottest names in all of music.
But you might be asking, “A 63 song album? Really?” especially since it feels like music is currently in an arm’s race with acts like Zach Bryan, Morgan Wallen, Beyoncé and others releasing 27 to 40-song monstrosities that already make it difficult to impossible for fans to parse through and digest. How is someone expected to have the time to listen to a 63-song record?
With Jesse Welles, the explanation is much more practical. First, he wants to give fans the ability to stream any one of his viral songs they might fancy, and in their full versions, and at their fingertips. Releasing the audio to the videos gives fans that capability to do so on demand as opposed to having to go to YouTube and search up a video, which is a pain in the keister.
Most importantly though, the bigger issue actually has to do with intellectual property and theft. Welles was already becoming the victim of song thieves uploading the audio to his videos to Digital Service Providers (DSP) like Spotify, and making money off his songs. As Saving Country Music reported in April of 2024, performers are having their songs stolen and uploaded, even sometimes before they can release them themselves. One way to protect yourself is to get your songs up ASAP, even if you delay the release date.
There are other practical reasons for Jesse Welles releasing this album, like the ability to use the Shazam app to identify the songs and the artist, or for people to use snippets of the songs on Tik-Tok and Instagram in a way that Jesse gets credit for. And yes, you can probably expect more album dumps from Welles coming in six month intervals as he continues to churn out tracks commentating on and lampooning current events at an incredible pace.
Some have already criticized Jesse Welles’ output as being too much, and this batch of previously-releases songs won’t help his case. But what Jesse Welles is doing defies all conventional norms. No artist or songwriter has ever been responsible for such a voluminous amount of output that still resonates widely with the public like Welles does. It’s unprecedented territory that calls for extraordinary measures to chronicle it, like releasing a 63-song album.
Who knows how long this will continue or where Jesse Welles goes from here. But cataloging his songs over this incredible period seems imperative, no matter how intimidating trying to dive into his music might be, especially if you’re just starting now. And all indications are that Jesse Welles isn’t slowing down and allowing any of us to come up for air any time soon. If you want to know where to start, chances are Jesse Welles has a new song coming out soon.
If you want to hear a more produced, curated, full band release from Jesse Welles, check out his album Middle. To listen to Under The Powerlines.
Will the Revolution Start at a Jesse Welles Concert?
At a sold-out Bowery Ballroom on Friday night, fans were stressed. They had been reading the news. Drowning in it. They’d made a separate group chat to keep the headlines away from the joy. They were watching Maddow and reading the AP for 20 minutes daily before law school. They were still reading the Times, however sheepishly; a leather-jacketed Hobokenite had the day’s full paper edition under his arm. Or they had traded their subscription to the Grey Lady and the rest of the American “legacy media horseshit” for the BBC and the Guardian. They were trying to take a step back from the updates. They were evangelizing about Heather Cox Richardson and Jamelle Bouie. They were streaming Hasan Piker on their boss’s dime every damn day.
They were still on X, but they were verifying their sources. They were considering running for county committee and getting back into organizing. They were studying all 1,249 pages of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. They were cybersecurity journalists, lawyers defending climate scientists from political censorship (work lately? “a nightmare”), and federal workers wondering about their jobs.
Onstage, just a 30-year-old guy and his acoustic guitar, was Jesse Welles, his shoulder-length Jim Morrison locks about scraggly as his voice. Wearing jeans, a green crewneck, and an enormous grin, he launched into song after song of, well, more news. Hours earlier, about a dozen blocks away, Luigi Mangione had appeared in court, charged with assassinating the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Fingerpickin’ under the lights, Welles sang about the company’s business model — one of his most popular songs: “You paid their salary to deny you what you’re owed / There ain’t no ‘You’ in UnitedHealth.” He warbled about the war in Gaza as an attempt to clear the Strip and turn it into resorts, and the crowd joined in, turning it into a pub anthem. Football-match chants of “Jesse! Jesse! Jesse!” echoed between songs. He ran through tunes about processed foods, whistleblowing at Boeing, fentanyl, Elon Musk. There were titterings of weary laughter and the occasional solidarity fist in the air.
A mix of old-fashioned folkie signifiers and trending-topic populism, delivered in hooky snippets on social media several times weekly, has taken Welles from obscurity to 2 million followers across TikTok and Instagram in under a year. In most of his clips, he croons and strums in front of an Arkansas field or a rural stretch of power lines. (During one number, an attendee shouted, “Why didn’t you film this one in the woods?”) He has churned out dozens of viral songs pegged to current events that deliver clear-eyed opinions in “a concise and consumable way,” as Jessica, a 25-year-old Long Islander, put it. Which is to say that he’s followed the influencer playbook of dropping a steady stream of commentary on what’s already being talked about — but with four chords and Wikipedia-mouthed wit.
It’s probably helped that Bob Dylan has been in the air, in no small part due to last year’s biopic starring Timothée Chalamet. Welles gets Dylan comparisons all the time owing to his rough-hewn vocal grain, the harmonica propped up around his face like orthodontic headgear, and a young Bob being the average person’s main reference point for wordy folk music with a bent toward social commentary. More than a dozen concertgoers told me they grew up on Dylan. For a duo of 24-year-old north Brooklyn Matts attending the show together, Dylan had led them to Welles. Ginger-bearded Matt, in a thrifted jacket featuring a map of local TV news stations, was going through “a big Bob Dylan phase,” so Tall Matt recommended Welles. Tall Matt had been on a Bob Dylan kick of his own, “and then I just really got into Jesse. He introduced me to John Prine and got me into a lot of older folk music.” One of Welles’s songs borrows the violin part from Dylan’s protest song “Hurricane,” and the Bowery show featured a speedy cover of his “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” The set also included renditions of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” and “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” by CCR, but his own songwriting consistently drew the most enthusiastic response.
A 26-year-old named Sierra told me they listen to a lot of folk music, “but I think a lot of folk that talks about more political stuff is older, like from the ’60s,” they said. “This feels like the start of something new again in this genre, and hopefully further out past the genre.” Their friend Shomari, a 31-year-old in a beanie and glasses, noted how much more common it has been for rappers to deal in specifics about the things happening in the present: “Kendrick, a lot of those guys — they’re all talking about the same stuff. This is just kind of a different font.”
“Jesse’s music has an absurdism of the American people who, since the end of ‘the End of History’ in 2020, have realized, Oh my God, the state of things is so obviously not anything that anyone would want,” Johana, a 26-year-old from Bellerose, told me. “It captures the futility of the moment.” In the 2024 general election, she wrote Joe Biden in as a fuck-you vote. “That’s what they deserve.”
Deborah, a 70-year-old who had flown in from a suburb of Rochester, spoke about Welles as if spellbound: “He’s the light in the darkness.” She had been surprised with tickets by her son-in-law, Ben. As they rested on a couch in the bar below the venue after the show, she was still in a daze. “I feel like I’m in TheTwilight Zone because I love him. I had a bad year in some ways with my health” — she had broken her hip — “and my mom died last year. But every morning and every night I would listen to his songs. He’s on my feed and I just suck it up.”
Many of Welles’s fans told me they are into other artists they see as political, citing Rage Against the Machine, System of a Down, riot grrrl, punk, and other folk. But a few said they typically stay away from music they view this way. “It works for me in this context because I find his lyrics to be really clever” — it’s hard not to smile at lines like “Monsanto Claus delivered all the cancer in your ass” — “and you can still enjoy the music without hearing the political side of it,” Megan, a 24-year-old journalist, told me. “Although I do tend to agree with a lot of his politics.” (She places herself “on the left.”) Marin, a 37-year-old with socialist views, attending with her boyfriend, said that unlike most political music, Welles’s gets a pass because “it seems a lot more authentic. It’s just one guy singing from the heart.”
When seemingly organic virality turned the unknown Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” into an overnight Billboard No. 1 in 2023, it was a premonition of Jesse Welles: a tree-backed video of a red-hued man from the rural South strumming an acoustic guitar and singing about elites’ depredations on the poor and working class. But where Oliver’s ire extended to regular people — “the obese milkin’ welfare,” for example — Welles tends to keep his sights trained on corporations and the rich and powerful. And while he hasn’t shied away from political lyrics (including anti-Trumpones), his songs usually live in the realm of complaint or implication, allowing people with disparate party allegiances to embrace his music. On Welles’s Instagram, you can find Glenn Beck simping in the comments and avowed fans claiming to be Trump voters.
Nonetheless, this was a mostly white room full of Kamala voters with a few Gaza-motivated abstainers mixed in. The most surprising thing about the crowd was the number of middle-aged people there to see their favorite TikToker alongside all the 20- and 30-somethings. They were lovers of NPR and The Daily or the Marxist Rev Left Radio. Nobody mentioned America’s most popular podcast, despite Welles’s songs including many Joe Rogan Experience–core topics: Lyme disease as a government-concocted bioweapon, New Jersey drone sightings, Ozempic skepticism, whistleblower deaths at Boeing. (Rogan himself is a Welles fan.) “He writes a lot of songs,” said Allegra, who was there celebrating her 33rd birthday. “I haven’t listened to every single one.”
In fact, he had released an album of another dozen songs that day, Middle. It is more produced and less newsy than the music that had brought most of the people to the Bowery to see him — subjects tend toward spiritual seeking, insecurity, nature, and the passage of time — and often features a full band. About an hour into the set, Welles brought out a drummer and an electric bassist to run through the new material. Nobody called out“Judas!” “The only filter placed on it was I wasn’t doing topical songs for this project,” he told the Times. “These are ones that are self-indulgent, or at least I feel like they are at times. I like to do both. They’re two different mediums.” With Middle, the medium he’s shooting for might be Spotify rather than the ephemerality of TikTok, the kind of traditional music career he aimed for in his former life as a major-label-signed hard rocker. Will his topical songs still find listeners in a year or three? Or will they feel like novelties, old memes that don’t hit like they did when Luigi was still at large? “The singles he posts are more relevant to stuff that works on social media,” a Long Island preschool teacher named Becky told me. “But with this album, I sat down and actually looked through the lyrics as it was playing, because I wanted to make sure that I heard it.”
Dylan famously chafed at the expectation that he would continue writing “finger-pointing songs,” and Kendrick has objected to the perception of him as an activist. At the Bowery, at least, Welles himself seemed at times a little overwhelmed by the crowd’s relentless earnestness. Mid-show, an audience member was overcome with radical inspiration. “The revolution will not be televised!” she screamed between songs. Welles tried to defuse it with a wry joke: “That’s because there ain’t a whole lot of TV.” She repeated her political prophecy louder a second time. All Welles could do was smile. “Faaar out,” he said, starting once again to play.
We are thrilled to announce that our 2025 John Prine Songwriter Fellowship recipient will be Jesse Welles.
Founded in partnership with John’s family, the Fellowship celebrates the legacy and impact that John had, and continues to have, on the Newport Folk community. Each year, one songwriter who embodies John’s spirit is chosen as the recipient. Congratulations, Jesse!
