In a small home recording studio on a Monday afternoon in January, Jesse Welles sat with a guitar on his lap, dressed head-to-toe in black.
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. He’s managed to turn subjects like the war in Gaza, the rise of the weight-loss drug Ozempic and the rapaciousness of United Healthcare’s business model into viral hits on TikTok and Instagram, building an audience of more than 2 million followers on those platforms. But the song he was recording in that basement in East Nashville, “Simple Gifts,” is a different beast.
As he delicately plucked his acoustic guitar, he sang its earnest opening lines — “Slouching towards the sky’s extent from the edges of a waste / Was something darker than a hope, something brighter still than fate” — sketching out an imagistic tableau untouched by current events. Welles’s new album, “Middle,” due Feb. 21, is similarly minded.
“The only filter placed on it was I wasn’t doing topical songs for this project,” he said. “These are ones that are self-indulgent, or at least I feel like they are at times. I like to do both. They’re two different mediums.”
The producer, Eddie Spear, rose from behind a mixing board and adjusted the microphone in front of Welles. Most of the songs on “Middle” are recorded with a full band, but for “Simple Gifts” and the album’s title track, the setup was pared down to a solitary microphone. “I’m trying to honor what people are enjoying about Jesse,” said Spear, who has also worked with Zach Bryan and Sierra Ferrell. “We thought getting a really simple capture in this way might tie in where he’s come from and honor this particular period of his career.”
At 30, Welles has already lived a full life in the music industry. Growing up in Ozark, Ark., he latched onto music, devouring homemade cassettes of Beatles albums his grandfather recorded for him from his collection, and listening to an oldies radio station that spun classic rock, Motown and old country songs. “If the South is 10 or 15 years behind the times, Ozark was about 30 years,” he said.
At 11, he used money he’d saved to buy a guitar at Walmart that became his near-constant companion: “I brought it to school, to the library.” At the public library in nearby Fayetteville, he discovered Smithsonian Folkways’ “Anthology of American Folk Music” and Bob Dylan’s 1962 self-titled debut. Welles had been told his voice sounded like “burnt toast,” but after a classmate on the school bus introduced him to Nirvana, he had an epiphany about his own singing: “I’m listening, going, ‘I could do something like that.’ I can’t do Robert Plant, but maybe I could do Cobain.”
As a teenager, Welles played in bands, learning his favorite songs and writing his own. On holiday breaks, he borrowed a drum kit from the school’s band director and set up a home recording studio in his mother’s garage, then burned his songs onto CDs he’d sell at school. “I’d end up with seasonal albums,” he said.
After high school, he kept churning out tracks, some under the name Jeh Sea Wells, others with the bands Dead Indian and Cosmic American. The music from this period included acoustic folk songs and loud, psychedelic garage-rock. The ever-growing catalog suggested a musical aesthetic more about the process than the product. “You can’t get precious about it,” Welles said. “It takes some serious hubris to think you’re going to write a masterpiece.” For him, the goal was always “just make a body of work.”
At 22, Welles moved to Nashville, formed a band simply called Welles and signed with 300 Entertainment, making him label mates with Young Thug and Fetty Wap. The band released an album of angsty grunge titled “Red Trees and White Trashes” in 2018 and toured relentlessly, opening for Greta Van Fleet and Highly Suspect and playing festivals including Bonnaroo and Austin City Limits.
Being on a label meant “jumping through the same hoops as everybody before you,” he said, like playing 500 shows in two years and building from there. “Then, there you are 500 shows later, and nothing to show for it. When you’ve got that many folks involved, it’s an investment. They want something to pop off. When it doesn’t, and you’ve done all the festivals, the music video, the tours, and they’ve moved on to something else, there’s no one left for them to blame but you, and there’s no one for me to blame but me.”
Dejected, he returned to Arkansas, intent on putting his rock ’n’ roll dreams to bed. “I was reading a lot and got really big into running,” he said. “I was like, ‘I’m going to imagine my life without playing music at all.’”
It didn’t take. In late 2023, he installed TikTok on his phone and noticed a profusion of musicians playing cover songs in his feed. He started doing the same: the Blaze Foley song “Clay Pigeons,” popularized by John Prine; Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright”; Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels.” They gained traction, so he kept it up.
“Then my old man had a heart attack, and something just snapped in me,” Welles said. “I started singing the news. It’s a way to make sense of what’s going on around me.”
Welles’s topical folk songs deftly blend the slightly whimsical with the deadly serious. The jaunty “Walmart” opens with the narrator watching “a toddler eat a cigarette on a cart of Keystone beer,” but the song evolves into a subtly searing indictment of predatory big-box capitalism. “War Isn’t Murder” is an angry protest anthem filled with sardonic lyrics that challenge conventional wisdom: “War isn’t murder, that’s what they say / When you’re fighting the devil, murder’s OK.”
“He doesn’t play as a Hollywood elite making Hollywood elite statements,” said Matt Quinn, the lead singer of the band Mt. Joy, who collaborated with Welles on a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” that was released in October. “It’s not easy to make topical songs in this political environment and not come off as partisan. He’s done a really good job finding the humanity in tricky issues and bringing everybody to the table.”
“Singing the news,” as Welles calls it, created a genuine buzz. Welles was invited to play Farm Aid in September, where Dave Matthews introduced him as “one of the best songwriters I’ve ever heard in my life.” His current tour of mid-sized clubs, running through April 10, sold out within two days of going on sale. Despite all indications that this upturn has been driven by songs he’d ripped from the headlines, he’s shrugged off any pressure to lean on them for the new album. Consequences be damned.
“I’ve been failing at this my entire life,” he said. “I’m familiar with the feeling. I’m OK with it.”
The songs on “Middle” aren’t completely walled off from the world. The exuberant, tightly crafted “Horses” references U.S. foreign policy but does so in service of a broader meditation on love and hate. The galloping “War Is a God” feels like an ominous, biblical parable that’s drenched in the daily stream of bloody images out of Gaza, Ukraine, Haiti and elsewhere, without ever mentioning them.
Much of the rest of the album surfs between surrealistic fantasy worlds and Welles’s own inner life. His dexterous writing and the tough, bare-bones arrangements can’t help but recall many of those classic rockers he grew up listening to — Dylan, Petty, Neil Young. If it turns out this isn’t what his growing fan base wants to hear, that’s fine. He continues to post a steady churn of all manner of songs on social media.
“The cool thing about putting them up immediately is knowing even if I thought it was a daggum masterpiece, you put it up and nobody’s keen on it, there’s your sign,” he said. “Move on to the next one.”
