I
t happened earlier this month the same way it always happens. Jesse Welles was scrolling on his cell at home in northwest Arkansas — Siloam Springs, population 21,000 — when he came across a recruitment ad for the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE to most of us).
“I thought, ‘Well, that sounds like a great use of my time,’” he says drolly. Putting down his phone, Welles mulled over the subject, opened a Google doc, and began tapping out lyrics written in the voice of a bottled-up ICE agent: “There’s a hole in my soul that just rages/Well, the ladies turned me down/And told me I was a clown/Well, won’t you look at me now/I’m putting folks in cages.”
Welles grabbed one of his acoustic guitars, set his words to a plucky folk melody, and eventually made his way to a nearby city park. To ensure as little background noise as possible, he headed for his preferred spot on a hill where the wind doesn’t blow so hard. Setting up his phone, pointed at himself, he began singing in a voice that evoked both Kurt Cobain’s anguish and John Prine’s wry mischievousness, his floor mop of hair bobbing back and forth to the beat. In no time, the new song “Join ICE” was on Welles’ social feeds, eventually racking up more than 1 million views.
Score another viral hit for Welles, and another step in the comeback of the protest song.
With Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the topical, off-the-news song has staged a minor comeback. Search long enough on TikTok or Instagram and you’ll stumble across outraged songwriters addressing the disarrayed state of the nation in homemade videos. But few, if any, are doing it as frequently and with as much of a social media impact as Welles.
Over the last year and a half, the 32-year-old has dashed off a barrage of outraged, barbed, or mocking songs about the mass casualties in Gaza (“War Isn’t Murder”), the Biden-Trump debate (“The Olympics”), the sorry state of healthcare in America (“United Health,” “Cancer”), opioid addiction (“Fentanyl”), Russian citizens drafted into the invasion of Ukraine (“How Many Times”), and those mysterious Jeffrey Epstein files (“The List”). And that’s just for starters. “It just helped me make sense of what was going on around me,” says Welles in a Zoom call from his home, displaying both his pronounced biceps and a mighty shag that makes him look like a hair-metal dude on a day off. “What you’re listening to is me making sense of the news: ‘What is this fentanyl crisis? Let me break it down in terms I can deal with and I’ll make it rhyme.’”
In a world awash in content, few should have noticed. But in a shift that indicates a desire to hear someone, anyone, sing truth to power during the disruptive Trump 2.0 era, Welles turned out to be the right man at the right time. His songs — most barely two minutes long, perfect for memes and viral moments — have accrued millions of views and largely supportive comments, as seen by the laudatory responses to “Join ICE.” Wrote one fan, “This is a dangerous song because conservatives don’t understand irony.” Another: “Been waitin for this, didn’t think it would be this fast. You’re always spot on but honey, you nailed this.” And this: “Incisive and savage. Great response to the moronic rhetoric and brutal policies of this sick administration.”
If that scenario sounds familiar, it should. Two years ago, a bearded Virginia troubadour named Oliver Anthony posted a raw-voiced tirade called “Rich Men North of Richmond,” also filmed in the woods and tapping into populist discontent. The song made Anthony a viral sensation, but he proved to be a one-rage wonder.
So far, Welles has managed to avoid that fate. Unlike Anthony, Welles has been mostly embraced by the more left-leaning Americana and folk world. At last year’s Farm Aid, Dave Matthews introduced Welles with, “I think he’s one of the best songwriters I’ve ever heard in my life. … he gives me hope and he’s unbelievable.” Both Sierra Ferrell and Billy Strings make appearances on Pilgrim, the insanely prolific Welles’ second of three albums released this year.
Nathaniel Rateliff also began waving the Welles flag. After meeting Welles at Farm Aid last year, the singer, who curated this year’s Newport Folk Festival, invited him to join the lineup. “It’s nice to hear somebody talk about anything that’s going on and calling things out as he sees it,” says Rateliff. “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.”
At Newport, the demand to see Welles was so strong that his set was moved from a smaller side stage to the main one. Thousands watched, in blistering heat, as he played his musical commentaries and some of his even stronger, less overtly political songs, like “Change Is in the Air” and “Horses.” “I think they certainly connected with the ‘young Bob Dylan’ aspect of him being a protest songwriter,” Rateliff says. “People are hungry for that in some ways.”
Every era needs its voice of the people, and through timing, luck, and talent, that person may be Welles. “There’s a lot of people protesting different things in their own way, which is a beautiful thing about America, and something we can’t forget — that we have the great gift to be able to sing these songs, and I don’t have to worry about my life,” he says. “No one will come and kill me.” But like Dylan and others before him, will they look to him for answers?
The sight of Welles strumming an acoustic guitar and knocking out ditties wasn’t a surprise to Simon Martin. A decade or so ago, when they were friends in Arkansas, the drummer and Welles would hang out on Martin’s porch in Fayetteville. “He’d bring a guitar and just play these same little simply folkie chord numbers and make stuff up,” Martin says. “We were sitting around smoking some grass, making jokes, and being stupid, so it’s funny to see him out in the woods doing that. Of course, the lyrics are now much more meaningful.”
The son of a mechanic and schoolteacher, Jesse Allen Breckenbridge Wells, as he was named at birth in 1992, grew up in Arkansas, watching PBS shows on a TV set with what he calls “rabbit ears” and tolerating his sister’s love of ‘NSync and Backstreet Boys. He himself was drawn to vintage music — Gladys Knight and the Pips to the Guess Who, he says — by way of the local oldies radio station. In second grade he sang “Twist and Shout” in a talent contest and, by high school, was introduced to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.
By his early teens, Welles had discovered the guitar; in an early sign of his clever streak, he started a high school band named the Stimulus Package, after the Obama recession program. When he was about 20, he dubbed himself “Jeh Sea Wells” and began recording and posting his songs on services like SoundCloud. He attended local colleges, earning a degree in music theory, but was working at a local Waffle House when he put an ad on Craigslist looking for band members. Martin responded and, with a bassist, they formed Dead Indian, which reflected one of Welles’ obsessions: Nirvana. “Which was already 20 years after the fact,” Welles says of the grunge pioneers. “But listen, if the middle of the country is behind the coasts, then the middle of Arkansas is behind 30 years.”
Over the next few years, Dead Indian put out a few records of next-generation ravaged grunge and played around the area. Welles was already itching to move on. He and Martin started another band, Cosmic American, but a record executive who heard some of his music suggested Welles move to New York, L.A., or Nashville. He chose the latter, which wasn’t as far away from Arkansas, and thus began his next group, Welles, adding an extra “e” to his surname.
Welles’ potential as a rocker was clear to Eddie Spears, the producer and engineer who worked with the band Welles and has continued to collaborate with the musician. “Jesse’s real quiet and has a calm aura to him,” he says. “But when he got behind a microphone, he had that great raspy, loud angst, at least at that time. He really embodied an amazing anger, like what you imagine John Lennon was like when he was making Plastic Ono Band.”
Looking back, Welles describes himself as “a 22-year-old whose only ambition from the time I was a teenager was to be signed to a record label.” But that dream didn’t pan out. The band Welles scored a gig at Bonnaroo in 2017, released a few EPs and a full album in 2018, and toured a bunch, but the world wasn’t especially interested in grunge-metal thrashings. The album went nowhere and Welles found himself back home in Arkansas. “I didn’t know what to do,” he says. “I had been playing and touring for about four years, real steady, and Covid knocked everything off the road. All my friends and I, we didn’t know what to do. So I said, ‘Well, I know something I can do. I can go back to the country, and I can live cheap out there and regroup.’”
At first, returning to his home state was, he says, a downer: “I got back to Arkansas and thought, ‘Well, this is the end. I’m quitting.’” But when his father suffered a heart attack (he survived), Welles made a decision that would change his life. “I thought, ‘If he goes right now, I’ve barely had any time with him,’” he says. “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.”
That summer of 2023, Welles encountered Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” video and was duly inspired. “I saw Chris,” he says, referring to Anthony by his real name, “and I thought, ‘Oh, we can do that.’ Good to know. You don’t need anything. You can enact change on your own. I loved how green it was; it was pleasant to look at. And I thought, ‘This is the way to go.’”
Two months after “Rich Men North of Richmond,” Welles ventured to that park near his home, pressed record on his phone, and began singing and strumming songs for the camera. At first he stuck with covers by the Beatles, Paul Simon, Nirvana, and Donovan, among many, but as he says, “I was tired of trying to remember the words to the classic-rock tunes, so I thought I would do my songs.”
Beginning in March 2024, he ventured into his originals, starting with “The Olympics,” a take on the potential rematch between Trump and Joe Biden that captured how exasperated many were at the thought of two boomers duking it out again. (Name-checking “Hotel California,” he sings, “For giving us such amazing music we could almost forgive you for our situation this damn dire.”) “I was taking all my cues from a Guthrie standpoint,” Welles says. “I’ve always, from a young age, liked Woody Guthrie, but I didn’t understand when I was a boy that it was subversive, like a truth vessel hidden in a fun song.”
The song would eventually accrue more than 1.4 million views on TikTok and signaled a new era for Welles. That same month, his manager partnered with Q Prime, the high-power management firm whose various divisions rep everyone from Metallica and Greta Van Fleet to Eric Church and Ashley McBryde. “I still don’t know what the big deal is,” Welles insists. “I just knew as soon as people liked ‘The Olympics,’ I thought, ‘Well, you have to do better than that, and you have to do better than the next one, and you have to do better than the next one. You’ve got a lot of work to do, mister.’ That’s what I reckoned.”
The way many people gravitated toward what he’s called his “new iteration” does appear to have taken Welles by surprise. Last year, he attended an Arkansas show by Rateliff and the Nightsweats, and Rateliff learned more about Welles’ background, the origin of his woodsy videos, and how Welles was adjusting to his new role. “He was like, ‘That’s not really what I do, though — I was in all these, like, rock bands,’” Rateliff says. “He’s got a young punk in there.”
Still, the topical tunes — with melodies that recalled vintage Guthrie or Prine and videos that spelled out the lyrics in each — kept coming. Some, like “Cancer,” are scathing (“as lucrative a business as a war,” he sings). Others are sarcastic, as when he quips, “Hell, even Kushner agrees, it’s good real estate,” in “War Isn’t Murder.” “You have to give folks credit,” he says. “We’d like to believe our peers maybe aren’t as smart as us, but people are smart, and I never write down to anybody.”
Posted just days after the assassination of United Healthcare head Brian Thompson, “United Health” mostly avoided commentary on the shooting but spelled out the ways that insurance companies riled up their own customers. Welles doesn’t feel he responded quickly enough to the incident, but the video has garnered more than 2.2 million views since it was posted. “I feel like I have finally put my foot down and decided what I needed to sound like and not tried to do anything anybody else really wanted of me,” he says. “I thought I needed to be a rock & roll player, but I just don’t have that coolness in me. To be able to just be myself, it just makes everything feel a lot better.”
Anna Canoni, Woody Guthrie’s granddaughter and the head of Woody Guthrie Publications, heard Welles last year, when “Cancer” popped up on a social reel. “It really got me to stop and take pause,” she says. “I listened to a few more songs and thought, ‘This is interesting.’ What made Woody stand out in his time was that he was singing songs about the Dust Bowl and the Depression to the people it was affecting. He was relating their story back to them in song. Jesse is doing the same thing. You go, ‘Who is this kid? Where has he been?’”
In conversation, Welles isn’t quite the firebrand heard in his songs. Pausing before responding to questions, he sometimes cocks his head and glances to the side, pondering the appropriate response. But one question — about whether he voted in the last presidential election — doesn’t elicit an answer at all. Staring at his Zoom camera, Welles scratches his head and remains silent for 20 seconds. Finally, he says, “I just … I didn’t know I’d be talking about that kind of thing,” and declines to respond.
On last year’s “Trump Trailers,” Welles envisioned the current president as a trailer-park resident who would “run for supervisor” and “lose the vote, not give a damn/Run over the ballot with his dad’s Trans Am.” From songs like that (or “Signal Leak,” which pokes at Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s group chats), one may assume Welles leans a certain, liberal-minded way. “We didn’t talk politics much,” says Martin about his days with Welles in Dead Indian. “But he was always welcoming of people who were different: trans folks, people who weren’t white. He was especially kind to homeless folks. I remember he’d always sit down and give them a cigarette and have a quick talk with them if they were hanging around. I always figured he was on the left side of the spectrum.”
Welles is aware of the questions Oliver Anthony faced — or avoided — after “Rich Men North of Richmond,” the way the media tried to dissect where he stood on the issues. “I suppose that is part of the endeavor,” Welles acknowledges of what Anthony encountered. “People want to know, and you may not yourself know just exactly what’s happened or what’s going on. Maybe no answer is good enough. I can’t imagine that’s an easy position to be in.”
In general, Welles projects that he’s not beholden to anyone. To maintain his independence, he’s now releasing his music on his own, with no record company backing. “That is true freedom,” he says. “You’re not going to find protest music with the Columbia Records stamp on it. It’s certainly not playing on the radio or anything like that.”
That philosophy also seems to extend to his political views. Unlike protest singers of the past, Welles doesn’t point fingers at specific people; names like Trump, Biden, or Kamala Harris never come up. On his voter registration form in Arkansas, Welles didn’t declare a party affiliation. Instead, he speaks in generalities, opting to be the voice of those who don’t trust anyone or anything in the so-called system. “I think a lot of us are politically homeless,” he says. “We’ve been orphaned, and it’s likely that we have been since before I was born. It seems very apparent now, in a way that maybe it didn’t in the past, that nobody has your interests in mind. And now it feels like the first step in any kind of progress is unearthing the truth of the matter first, and we are arriving at that truth every day.”
How is that approach reflected in the current White House? Again, Welles doesn’t mention specific names, although he hints at Elon Musk. “How do they not care about the little man, the citizen?” he says. “It seems like eons ago, but I do believe there was a very prominent billionaire who was a very critical component of the government, for what seems now like just a blip in time. That was maybe one of the first times it was visible. If there is one takeaway, the American people can know, after decades and decades of war and coverup, that at the end of the day, we are not who they have in mind.”
Events of the last month, like immigration crackdowns and military call-ups, also elicit more philosophical musings than lashings out. “It seems like a great, concerted, and obvious distraction,” he says. “At all times, from all directions, throwing everything at the wall to see what will stick with the public. And nothing is sticking.” What are they distracting us from? “I don’t know what exactly, because none of us know what the truth is. But to distract any individual from the truth is the game plan, and has been for decades. But especially now.”
When he does get a bit more specific, his responses can be unexpected. In another online song, “PBS,” Welles sang about being a “kiddo down in Arkansas” who watched Mr. Rogers and “a purple dinosaur.” But he doesn’t seem as rattled as others in the music world by the collapse of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the way that may result in local public-radio stations being unable to play music on the air without CPB funding. “They’ll be fine,” he says, then adds, referring to himself, “It’s not the duty of National Public Radio to spin some loser’s record from Arkansas. They’re there to inform. The music has moved over to streaming. I don’t know who’s really relying on radio. Some of the biggest artists right now don’t even have any radio play.”
Sacha Lecca/Rolling Stone
Whether it’s careful or calculated, Welles’ strategy is savvy, since he wants to be known as more than just the guy spewing songs inspired by cable news. On his three latest albums, including this week’s Devil’s Den, he’s made a concerted effort to include only one social-commentary song per record. That slot on Devil’s Den goes to “The Great Caucasian God,” about, he says, “the evangelical lockstep with war in the Middle East, and kind of a radical notion of bringing about the end times by killing people.” With its starkly beautiful arrangements and moments of Mellencamp-reminiscent rock dynamics, the more generalized songs on Pilgrim tap into both the disorientation and frustration so many of us are feeling right now: The Great Plains sweep of “Change Is in the Air” gives way to the Cobain Americana of “GTFOH” (for “get the fuck out of here”).
Where Welles goes from here has even relative veterans like Rateliff intrigued. “Creating a space for yourself that feels authentic is something he’s done really well, but now that he’s arrived somewhere, I’m curious to see how he navigates all that, in a positive way,” says Rateliff. “The way people first discover you is how they see you. So even if daily political songs aren’t what Jesse is, it’s what people see him as now, and people create their own narrative. How do you continue to change and grow and present yourself if people have an expectation of you?”
After a return engagement at Farm Aid in late September, Welles will embark on a series of multi-night residencies in Chicago, Denver, L.A., San Francisco, and New York, all of which are sold out. He’s likely to draw crowds similar to the ones who flocked to his tour early this year and sang along with every word of “Fentanyl” and another fan favorite, “Walmart” (“I don’t wanna go to Walmart today/Or tomorrow/Or the day after that/It’s a mirage in a desert of bullshit they created”). “There are certain musicians who hit the right chords at the right time, when people feel a lack of empowerment,” says Canoni. “The beauty of Woody’s work is that music can bring people together, and that’s what I’m hoping for Jesse’s work. But,” she adds with a laugh, “no pressure.”
At Newport, a hint of Welles’ past, present, and future was there for all who attended to see. He was invited onstage to join some of the festival’s boldface names, including Margo Price, Prine’s son Tommy, and Lukas Nelson. Welles played both solo and with a backup band. With Nelson, Welles brought out an electric guitar and joined in on a version of the Beatles’ “Revolution.” In a moment that somewhat echoed Dylan’s gone-electric moment 60 years ago that weekend, Welles ended by trashing and stomping on his guitar. Rateliff, who was standing nearby when it happened, thought the move was of a piece with Welles’ attempts to not be relegated to one musical bag: “He’s trying to let people know he’s more than just the guy with the guitar in the field. He’s Bob Dylan going electric every night.”
“It was just a whim,” Welles says now of the smashup. “At the moment, I thought that was the perfect thing to do. And still feels like the perfect thing to do.” Told that it felt more rock & roll than something one would see at Newport, he smiles and makes a possible Dylan reference. “I contain multiple dudes,” he says.
