Meet Jesse Welles, the Folk Singer Who Turns News into Folk Music, Writing Songs on Elections, Plane Crashes, Ozempic & More

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:

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Mar­ley, Pub­lic Ene­my, Bil­ly Bragg & More

Tom Pet­ty Takes You Inside His Song­writ­ing Craft

The Acoustic Gui­tar Project Gives Song­writ­ers World­wide a Gui­tar and One Week to Write a Song

David Byrne Curates a Playlist of Great Protest Songs Writ­ten Over the Past 60 Years: Stream Them Online

John Prine’s Last Song Was Also His First to Go No. 1: Watch Him Per­form “I Remem­ber Every­thing”

The Effi­ca­cy of Protest Songs — Four Song­writ­ers Dis­cuss on Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #121

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.