Jesse’s Interview with Acoustic Guitar

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/