Welles Determined Not To Be Yesterday’s News

Protest singer Jesse Welles is determined not to be yesterday’s news

In the 2020 drama News of the World, Tom Hanks plays an itinerant soul eking out a living travelling the post-Civil War West, reading newspapers aloud to crowds. The monologues not only provided information but also amusement, even if the news concerned calamities.

“See all those words printed in a line one after the other? Put ’em all together and you have a story,” Hanks’s grizzled news aggregator explains.

The protest singer Jesse Welles offers much the same proposition in 2025, but with songs. With his raspy voice, impressive mane of hair and tuneful sloganeering inspired by the front pages, the 32-year-old Arkansan has struck a populist chord in the internet age.

What he calls “field recordings” are just that – simple smartphone videos for social media consumption, of him and an acoustic guitar in a woodsy setting railing against soulless corporate retailing (Walmart) or music industry greed (Payola). Welles responded to the murder of insurance executive Brian Thompson in 2024 with United Health, a satirical 86-second ditty with a melodic lope: “Commoditized health, monopolized fraud / There’s doctors that we own, and research that we’ve bought…”

Welles’s transformation from an unknown indie rocker to Gen Y’s Woody Guthrie was more or less overnight. He says he came to an epiphany after his father suffered a heart attack.

“It really stuck with me just how short life is,” Welles told The Globe and Mail earlier this month on a video call from his home in Siloam Springs, Ark. “We all go, and I didn’t want to be lying there and be preoccupied with the feeling that I’ve lived an unfulfilled life.”

One morning early last year, Welles got out of bed and wrote War Isn’t Murder, a reaction to the Israel-Hamas war that rhymed “Netanyahu” with “a bomb for you.”

Since April 18, 2024, the song’s video has racked up more than two million YouTube views. The tune represents a flash philosophical awakening and songwriting turnabout.

“I had woken up to everything that was going around me,” Welles recalled. “What you’re hearing in War Isn’t Murder is my own shock.”

The son of a mechanic father and a schoolteacher mother was born Jesse Allen Breckenridge Wells. He previously released music under the name Jeh-sea Wells and later, with his band Welles, whose grungy, psychedelic debut album Red Trees and White Trashes from 2018arrived with a young man’s unsophisticated sentiments: “So give me all the drugs / Cover me in blood / It’s all I need / Rock and roll.”

Turns out, rock ‘n’ roll did not need him. Welles added the “e” to his name, shaved his beard and eventually reinvented himself as a hot-button-topic troubadour. He plays a sold-out Danforth Music Hall in Toronto on Saturday, with future full houses at the city’s Massey Hall and Vancouver’s Commodore Ballroom already on the itinerary for next March.

An article in Rolling Stone magazine asked, “Can Jesse Welles revive the protest song?” Despite Welles’s success in the medium so far, there are signs the revival might not take.

Country star and U.S. Navy veteran Zach Bryan recently posted a snippet of his forthcoming topical song Bad News, which included lyrics critical of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. When the song received a polarized response, Bryan backed away from the controversy faster than a pickup truck after a honky-tonk’s last call.

“I served this country, I love this country and the song itself is about all of us coming out of this divided space,” Bryan wrote on Instagram, saying he was “just as confused as everyone else.”

The Dust Bowl balladeer Guthrie once painted the words “This machine kills fascists” on his guitar. Bryan’s “Just as confused as everyone else” doesn’t have the same ring to it.

For his part, Welles realizes his quick-hit singles The Olympics (about the Trump-Biden debate) and the doleful ballad Charlie (about slain right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk) won’t stand the test of time.

“Why would anyone read last month’s newspaper?” he said.

(Of course, classic protest songs such as Bob Dylan’s Hurricane or Neil Young’s Ohio transcended the news cycle.)

On a flurry of albums released this year, Welles continues to include songs that react to the current era, even if they don’t have a viral-hit impact: Will the Computer Love the Sunset (from Pilgrim), Horses (“All my flannels made in Bangladesh / All my T-shirts in Vietnam,” off Middle), and America, Girl (from Devil’s Den).

Asked last month by Rolling Stone about how he voted in the last election, Welles declined to comment. Speaking to The Globe, he stayed clear of left and right.

“So many of us are politically orphaned and have not been politically and ideologically represented in 30 or 40 years,” he explained. “My generation has voted and voted, and only seen the American dream get further and further away from them, no matter who was in office.”

Protest singer Jesse Welles is determined not to be yesterday’s news, Brad Wheeler, October 15, 2025
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/culture/music/article-jesse-welles-protest-singer/