At first glance, Jesse Welles resembles nothing so much as a time traveler from the year 1968. That’s how I would open a profile about him, but The New York Times’ David Peisner takes a different approach, describing him recording a song in his home studio. “Welles, a singer-songwriter with a shaggy, dirty-blond mane and a sandpapery voice, has risen to recent prominence posting videos to social media of himself alone in the woods near his home in northwest Arkansas, performing wryly funny, politically engaged folk songs,” Peisner continues. This practice has produced “viral hits on TikTok and Instagram, building an audience of more than 2 million followers on those platforms.”
Welles’ subjects have included “the war in Gaza, the rise of the weight-loss drug Ozempic, and the rapaciousness of United Healthcare’s business model.” You can hear his musical takes on these news-pegged subjects on his YouTube channel, along with such other much-viewed, ripped-from-the-headlines songs as “Fentanyl,” “Walmart,” “Whistle Boeing,” and “We’re All Gonna Die.”
For his younger listeners, his subject matter (and his perspective on it) have a kind of currency much intensified by life on social media; for his older listeners, his manner and musicianship recall a golden age of the protest singer that many would have assumed a wholly closed chapter of cultural history.
It will, perhaps, disappoint both relevant demographics that Welles’ forthcoming debut album Middle includes none of these viral hits, nor anything much like them. “The only filter placed on it was I wasn’t doing topical songs for this project,” Peisner quotes him as saying, later writing that the album “surfs between surrealistic fantasy worlds and Welles’s own inner life.” This counterintuitive move is understandable: given his obvious chops honed with the inspiration of Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and John Prine, being pigeonholed as a singer of the news on TikTok has probably never been his ultimate goal. A couple of decades from now, music critics may declare that Oliver Anthony walked so that Jesse Welles could run.
Related content:
Tom Petty Takes You Inside His Songwriting Craft
The Acoustic Guitar Project Gives Songwriters Worldwide a Guitar and One Week to Write a Song
John Prine’s Last Song Was Also His First to Go No. 1: Watch Him Perform “I Remember Everything”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
