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Some music critics, like Steven Hyden, really don’t like Americana singer-songwriter Jesse Welles. “It’s all just a pile-up of performatively plain-spoken words over a fourth-rate Woody Guthrie guitar strum, over and over,” Hyden wrote in an anti-Welles manifesto last month.
Some hard-liners really don’t like Welles because of “Charlie,” his gentle folk song released the day after right-wing personality Charlie Kirk was murdered. “No one should get killed / no blood should be spilled” seems like a sentiment we can all agree on, but these are polarizing times. And after about a decade as an underground rocker, Welles has become famous as a folk artist in the last couple of years by taking musical cannonballs into polarizing issues.
Welles — a babyfaced, shaggy-haired, 32-year-old Arkansas native whose life was changed as a Southern teenager by discovering Aldous Huxley and Allen Ginsberg — has released three albums this year and drops news-savvy songs (“Tylenol,” “Join ICE,” etc.) on YouTube constantly, often in videos showing him looking directly into a smartphone from a wooded area near some powerlines. It’s not unexpected that some journalists, musicians and proponents of cancel culture hate Welles for going viral by finding a niche, but it is surprising as well as uplifting that young people have discovered what used to be called protest music through the singer, whose palette includes the sweetness and humor of John Prine and the attitude of someone who grew up on grunge.
“It’s good to hear that some pacifist groups have picked up on ‘War Isn’t Murder,’” Welles says. “That’s good. The things that we can meet on the Venn diagram, I think, are some of the most enjoyable. I see a lot of sons and mothers and fathers at my shows, and I think that is so important to start to heal the generational wound, you know? The last thing they could really divide us up by was by generation, and they’ve managed to with flying colors. It’s going to be very important moving forward, as just humanity moving forward, to be able to have the generations become friends again.”
Welles will headline sold-out shows at the Ogden Theatre on October 29 and 30. He says he’s developed a good relationship with Colorado over the years, initially as Jeh Sea Wells, fronting numerous garage-style bands, and now as an overnight sensation and torchbearer for antifascist protest music that goes back to Woody Guthrie.
“Colorado is ‘The West’ to me,” Welles says. “It’s all good until I try to play my harmonica, and then I can’t really breathe, being from a river valley. When I was nineteen, me and my buddy went and camped in Rocky Mountain National Park for about a week and just hiked and camped and wrote tunes and stuff. I had the Ginsberg collected poems, the big red book. I was just out there pretending to be some kind of Beatnik, I suppose. It was those Beats that had romanticized Denver to me.”
Welles says that Howl, the Tao Te Ching, J.D. Salinger and Walt Whitman knocked his doors off as a teenager, benefiting from “isolation, maybe a lack of technology, just going to the library and exploring, just being weird. I was just a weird kid, you know? I wasn’t concerned with the things that other kids my age were concerned with.”
Today, Welles — who played Farm Aid 40 last month in Minneapolis with Willie Nelson, Neil Young and others on his political wavelength — isn’t concerned if kids, or even adult fans, don’t get the overarching messages of such songs as “War Isn’t Murder” or “Amazon Santa Claus” and just enjoy the music.
“As far as people digging it for the guitar or whatever, it’s like if someone was using the Tao Te Ching as a doorstop, and in that respect, they’re getting a practical use out of it,” he says. “So where’s the harm in that? It’s there. If someone were to come to the house and remove the doorstop to read it someday, then it would have served two purposes. There are songs that I’ve listened to my entire life that I probably didn’t really understand until last year, you know? You come back to it and have a whole new understanding of it. If you’re listening at all, that’s just a wonderful thing.”
On the other hand, being from the deep South, Welles — with songs like “The Great Caucasian God” and “Starve Away” — sometimes poses a problem: His satirical anthem “Rednecks” was taken seriously by racists, who ran with it as a genuinely bigoted song they could grab hold of and get down with.
“I come home and people — some folks — don’t get the joke,” Welles explains. “Some folks think that if you worked a little harder, then you’d have a lot more, or that it’s your own damn fault you’re so damn fat. They listen to those tunes and they take them at face value and they go, ‘Hey man, I love you.’ But it surprises me in Arkansas, how many folks will come up and genuinely like it, appreciate the message, and in that you become aware of this big silent middle. More of us want peace than the news would have you believe.”
Welles brought out a full band for part of his Farm Aid set, lending a Bob-Dylan-at-Newport explosiveness to his otherwise stripped-down folk songs, and he’s released some recordings with the band and brought them along on his current tour. On top of his busy life churning out new music constantly, along with performing, he’s an avid runner who completed a marathon recently and says he gets a lot of the news that informs his songs by listening to “news programs from all over.”
“I’ll pay attention to what is going on, on things like Threads and X, but sometimes I have trouble finding a kind of middle ground or less intense view, looking at either of those platforms,” he says. “That’s where it can get overwhelming, if you’re taking everything in off social media. It doesn’t drag me down, or I’m so dragged down I don’t even realize how down I am. I think I’m okay.”
Jesse Welles, Wednesday, October 29, and Thursday, October 30, Ogden Theatre, 935 East Colfax Avenue. The shows are sold out.
