Singing for Truth and Justice

Jesse Welles Sings Out for Truth and Justice

Jesse Welles is being hailed as the new voice of a generation and his milestone tour stop at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore Auditorium shows why.

Jesse Welles is having a dream year for a musician in 2025, rocketing to stardom in a way that makes him seem sort of like an overnight sensation. Yet digging into his backstory reveals a long and winding road. He toured for years, leading multiple rock bands, while making little career progress and getting burnt out to the point of almost throwing in the towel. He left Nashville and returned to his hometown in Arkansas, where a simple twist of fate altered his direction when his dad suffered a life-threatening heart attack. 

“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,” Welles told Rolling Stone earlier this year, regarding his decision to keep writing songs and post them to social media. It wasn’t long after that that he became inspired to focus his lyrics on topical songs about current events and to tell it like it is.

Nathaniel Rateliff, who curated this year’s Newport Folk Festival and asked Jesse Welles to join the lineup, took notice. “It’s nice to hear somebody talk about anything that’s going on and calling things out as he sees it,” Rateliff explained in the Rolling Stone story. “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.”

[Middle]

The Sanders-style approach helps explain why Welles has become so popular with progressive-minded fans who are still hungry for a political revolution. Welles is also a talented musician and prolific songwriter, cranking out new material at a pace that rivals artists like King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard or Ryan Adams. Welles released a handful of albums across 2024-25, alternating between solo acoustic and full band formats. His Middle album, released in January, features Welles dialing back on overtly political topics while still delivering insightful lyrics backed by his rock ‘n’ roll band.

Yet it’s the zeitgeisty songwriting that’s made Jesse Welles into a burgeoning new voice of a generation, generating surging demand for his current tour, which has been selling out multiple nights at mid-size venues across the nation. There was also a high-profile return appearance to the Farm Aid benefit concert in Minneapolis, where Welles and Billy Strings sat in with Margo Price for a rousing rendition of Bob Dylan‘s classic workers’ lament, “Maggie’s Farm”.

Welles is riding a big wave of momentum as his “Middle Earth Tour” touches down for two nights at the Fillmore in San Francisco on 4-5 November. Those who fail to make it to the show on the first night are kicking themselves here on Wednesday, 5 November, when reports come down that Welles was joined by the great Joan Baez on night one for a symbolic coronation that included Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” and Welles’ “No Kings”. It’s a milestone moment, but one with vibes that carry over to the next night, too, since it’s a two-night stand. 

The nine-song solo acoustic segment that opens the show is a master class in troubadour style, demonstrating how Jesse Welles has won the hearts of the people, because there’s no one else in the music world speaking out so candidly about late-stage capitalism and militarism. He opens with “The List”, a tune that namechecks the infamous Epstein list and how “Anybody on the big list knows just how far the folks in charge will go to keep the status quo.” 

The anti-establishment theme continues in “Join ICE”, as Welles sings satirically about recruitment for the modern-day Gestapo that hunts down alleged illegal immigrants in America: “Take my advice / If you’re lacking control and authority / Come with me and hunt down minorities / Join ICE.” The song wins hoots and hollers from the audience, as Welles testifies in the appealingly subversive way that’s been a theme of his meteoric rise.

“Walmart” critiques capitalism and the atmosphere at the infamous retail chain, as Jesse Welles cites how he “saw a toddler eat a cigarette on a cart of Keystone beer”. Meanwhile, “Fentanyl” slams the culture that enables “the atom bomb of drugs” with great lines like “Send dough to the enforcement, they build another jail, Give money to a hammer, they’re gonna buy a nail.”

Another zeitgeisty crowd pleaser is “United Health”, as Welles rips the ignominious healthcare giant that came into the spotlight when disgruntled rebel Luigi Mangione went to the extreme measure of assassinating the company’s CEO. “Commoditized health, monopolized fraud, There’s doctors that we own and research that we’ve bought, They own the loans and physicians, pharmacies and meds, They should start selling graves just to fuck you when you’re dead,” Welles sings of the corrupt American healthcare industry.

The song resonates widely because so many people have had problems with denial of care or even just meds, including this reporter, when Blue Shield recently rejected a doctor’s prescription for a particular inhaler in a maddening fashion, with CVS saying the doctor had to call Blue Shield to explain why the particular scrip was needed?!

“Cancer” continues lamenting the medical industry, as Welles concludes, “Cancer is as lucrative a business as a war / So if you ain’t expecting peace / Then why expect a cure?” One of the hardest-hitting songs of the night is “The Poor”, as Jesse Welles digs into the inequality that plagues America and the crass attitude with which narcissistic elitists lecture the less fortunate.

“If you worked a little harder / Then you’d have a lot more / So, the blame and the shame’s on you / For being so damn poor,” Welles sings, with an urgency conveying that he’s lived it. That includes lamenting the inadequate American educational experience: “I was memorizing capitals, I was in the spelling bee / I must’ve missed the part / Where they taught the art of private equity.”

The song feels particularly timely, with Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, having just been elected Mayor of New York City, as Welles wins a rousing ovation for his stirring performance. Between the resonance of his insightful lyrics and the heartfelt delivery of the songs, Welles has tapped into something special with his soul-soothing voice.

The rest of the band then come onstage as the show moves to the next level, starting with the honky tonk swing of “Domestic Error”. Jesse Welles continues to throw darts at the powers that be, singing “I didn’t know the world was ending / I didn’t know God’s wrath was next / I never seen that many trolls down a rabbit hole / Until I went and logged into X.” The chorus goes further as he sings “Hotels, casinos and spaceships / Teslas and tunnels are fine / Folks get too close to the big White House / And they lose their goddamn minds,” followed by a hot harmonica break. 

“Red” features a similar bluesy Americana swagger as the group heat up, while Welles sings of “All the Marxists and the Fascists” holding hands upon meeting the devil. “The Great Caucasian God,” from 2025’s latest releases, Devil’s Den (solo) and With the Devil (the same songs with a full band), is another satirical winner, a wry, upbeat number with slide guitar and piano for a 1970s vibe. The song even features a spoken word bridge where Welles sounds kind of like Mick Jagger on the bridge of “Far Away Eyes” from 1978’s Some Girls.

The set soars higher still on “God, Abraham, and Xanax”, a topical tune that takes a poke at Elon Musk and also features Jesse Welles ripping a smoking solo on electric guitar to ignite a fiery jam. The band really rock out here, revealing that Welles can still be a genuine rock ‘n’ roll hero in addition to his growing role as a town square troubadour. “War is a God” keeps things rocking, an anti-war tune in which Welles compares war to religion, singing “Maybe war is a god and we’re just super superstitious.” The bluesy “Change Is in the Air” shifts the tone in a moodier direction, while still featuring more of Welles’ heartfelt emotional vocals.

A tease of the riff from Heart’s “Barracuda” serves as an intro to “GTFOH”, a song that takes on a proggy power-pop vibe from the early 1980s. A surprise cover of Tom Petty’s “Refugee” continues to display a well-rounded diversity, invoking one of rock’s most widely loved songwriters (whose ghost seems to endearingly live on as a DJ on SiriusXM Radio with more than a decade of episodes of “Tom Petty’s Buried Treasure” show). The honky tonk ballad “Wild Onions” concludes the band segment, making a smooth segue back to another solo sequence. 

In “Saint Steve Irwin”, Jesse Welles plays electric guitar and sings of how he’s gotta keep moving on and fight through the pain because he can see the light at the end of the tunnel. “There’s hope on the horizon / Or maybe the Earth’s just flat, he sings. “Turtles” is a simple yet endearing tune about those cute independent reptiles. “Let It Be Me” includes a charming reference to looking for his spaceship in the Dagobah system from the Star Wars saga.

The seven-song solo segment leads to the band returning again, starting with another great tune about an endangered animal as Welles wonders, “What will become of all the Whales?” The Fillmore is then treated to a taste of Welles’ alt-rock era with an incendiary performance of Nirvana‘s “Heart Shaped Box”, providing a glorious flashback to the golden age of grunge in the early 1990s. Welles is on acoustic guitar here, but he makes it sound heavy, and his gritty vocals are a worthy tribute to Kurt Cobain.

“Malaise” features a bluesy yet heartwarming vintage Americana sound, with slide guitar, harmonica, and piano, as Jesse Welles wonders “who in space is left to blame” for his malaise. “It Don’t Come Easy” takes a more upbeat approach with infectious melodies and hot solo breaks from piano and slide guitar. 

[Horses]

A peak moment occurs with “Horses”, an electrifying tune that was getting heavy play on indie radio in the spring as the lead single for Middle, with a sound that recalls Bob Dylan‘s “Hurricane”. The lyrics hit deep too as Welles sings, “I’m singing this song about loving, All the people that you’ve come to hate, It’s true what they say, I’m gonna die someday, Why am I holding on to all this weight? You know, I really thought that there’d be power, In thinking half of y’all was just born fools, Thought I was gathering oats for my horses, I was getting by whipping my mules.”

The bold sentiment about loving all the people that you’ve come to hate mirrors that expressed by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard on “Daily Blues” from 2024’s Flight b741, when Stu Mackenzie sings, “Lay down your weapons / What you gotta do is / Find that person you hate / And Grab ’em by the hand / Look ’em in the eye / And say, ‘I love you’.” It’s not hard to imagine Jesse Welles and King Gizzard on the same festival bill in 2026, as they’ve both demonstrated an evident penchant for being artists of the people.

Welles takes a moment to thank San Francisco, noting that he went to the [Golden Gate] Bridge earlier in the day and enjoyed seeing the seals and sea lions. This leads to a local cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain”, a song that seems to be right in Welles’ wheelhouse. “Wheel” feels like it could come from that same era, with Welles singing “Wheel keep turning / I’ll keep learning / I keep on spinning on.”

“Fear Is the Mind Killer”, from Middle, closes the nearly two-and-a-half-hour set, another heartfelt number in which Jesse Welles warns that fear “Plants the seed of hate within you.” He wraps the huge show with a solo acoustic encore on one of his most political (and most popular) songs, “War Isn’t Murder”, from 2024’s Helles Welles record. The lyrics cut deep as Welles sings, “War isn’t murder / There’s money at stake / Girl, even Kushner agrees it’s good real estate / War isn’t murder, ask Netanyahu / He’s got a song for that and a bomb for you / War isn’t murder it’s an old desert faith / It’s a nation-state sanctioned, righteous hate.”

It’s always special when a rising star makes their debut appearance at the Fillmore, and Jesse Welles’ visit to this sacred sonic temple has been another such occasion. Later in the week, Welles’ prolific output is honored with four Grammy nominations: Best Americana Performance for “Horses”, Best American Roots Song for “Middle”, Best Americana Album for Middle, and Best Folk Album for Under the Powerlines (April 24-September 24). Jesse Welles has most definitely arrived, and it should be interesting to see where he goes next now that he has America’s attention.

Greg M. Schwartz
https://www.popmatters.com/jesse-welles-concert-2025