A Populist for Progressives
Jesse Welles Finds New Life in Folk Songs
By Charlie Bertsch
The stunning success of American folksinger Jesse Welles testifies to the rich afterlife of authenticity.
Rather than hammering the last nail into its coffins, as many pundits feared, AI opened the lid.
Evidence of this increasingly forceful haunting abounds.
Despite the fact that social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok are full of professionally made and AI-generated content, relentlessly pushed at us by algorithms designed to reinforce mindless passive consumption, the posts people are most excited about sharing, the ones that go viral, disproportionately feature content that foregrounds what makes us human.
Cue the work of Jesse Welles.
The term “troubadour” has been thrown around far too often in relation to modern popular musicians. But he fits it better than most, especially now that he is touring to sold-out crowds, finding ways to make the most threadbare conventions feel fresh.
A talented rock musician who moved from Arkansas to the music-industry hotbed of Nashville, Tennessee, in the mid-2010s, Welles eventually returned home without having made it big.
In 2023, he decided on a different tack, recording short videos of himself playing cover songs on an acoustic guitar in natural settings around his home, such as the middle of the forest or the overgrown meadow made by a corridor of power lines. Then he began adding his own compositions to the mix.
The short clips Welles made from these solo sessions started blowing up on TikTok, driving traffic to his YouTube channel.
He is now popular enough to appear with a band on the ABC late-night show Jimmy Kimmel Live, promoting his new album Middle.
Welles appeals to a wide range of people, building on the recent surge of interest in Bob Dylan’s work inspired by the Timothée Chalamet biopic, A Complete Unknown. Baby Boomers and surviving members of the folk music-loving generation that preceded them find his stripped-down aesthetic comforting. But a surprisingly large number of teens and twenty-somethings are also drawn to it.
It helps that he regularly shares songs that critique the rich and powerful, devoting particular attention in recent months to the second Trump Administration’s assault on American institutions and Elon Musk's break-things-before-you-make-things mindset.
“Signal Leak” is a humorous send-up of National Security Advisor Michael Waltz’s use of the popular messaging app to plan for a “secret” strike on Yemen.
One of Welles’ signature moves is to lure listeners in with lyrics so simple they sound like something appropriate for pre-schoolers, only to slip in double meanings with a savage edge.
His recent song “Red” is a particularly good example, highlighting Musk’s transformation from a visionary beloved of well-off liberals into a reactionary firebrand:
I got me a red house and a red car
Runs on big red batteries
They used to be blue
Fifteen minutes ago
But they turned red just for me
As the song unfolds, Welles keeps finding new ways to make the colour signify. He conjures the spectre of a bloody outcome to the current political crisis. Then he invokes the popular 1999 science-fiction film The Matrix to lampoon the concept of “red-pilling”, which reactionary conspiracy theorists derived from it, right after suggesting that Musk’s use of a Roman salute might have something to do with his love of “white powder”:
I got me some red pills
And a bottle
I got black and blue ones too
All the pills are all the same
The illusion is you choose
There are clear parallels between the viral explosion of Jesse Welles and that of Oliver Anthony, whose 2023 folk song “Rich Men North of Richmond” rode a wave of populist resistance to the apparent expansion of government reach in the wake of the pandemic.
Despite being celebrated by conservatives, Anthony insisted that he didn’t mean for the song to seem partisan. But the stereotypes he invokes suggest that they understood "Rich Men North of Richmond" better than he did.
Although Welles may be tapping into the same reservoir of populist sentiment that Oliver Anthony did, songs like “Red” make it abundantly clear that the rich men in his sights don’t just live north of Richmond or vote for Democrats, even if some of the people praising him mistake his homespun vibe for a message from the bygone America they dream of restoring.
A cynical person might point out that Jesse Welles is deceiving us.
After all, the solitude and sense of immediacy his clips communicate are illusions since he is connecting with thousands of people through them, using the technological mediation of deeply problematic platforms.
His rough-hewn performances can feel a bit like watching one of those mountaineering documentaries in which you marvel at the in-your-face spectacle of climbers defying death, only to remember that somebody had to lug a camera up to 8,000 metres and position it just so in order to capture them.
As the brutal satire of Elia Kazan’s brutal 1957 film A Face in the Crowd already communicated, the yearning to have a true man or woman of the people become a star is so deeply engrained within the American culture industry that we should be wary of anyone who finds favour with the insiders who program content for shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live.
But Welles has great answers for the sceptics.
Although he obviously isn’t composing his songs on the spot, the fact that so many of them are topical, in sync with the narrowing gyre of the news cycle, demonstrates his dedication.
The way he ends most videos, walking up to the camera to stop the recording instead of editing that part out, reinforces the ethos of his DIY approach.
Most importantly, Welles incorporates enough self-reflexivity into his songs to confirm awareness of its paradoxes.
He confronts it directly in “Will the Computer Love the Sunset?”, which he recently recorded in a parking garage. The lyrics worry that we will "midwife our demise" by giving machines too much power over us.
“Can it calculate my love? Will it know how to be kind? You can’t just rewind.” That last line does a wonderful job of distilling the way Welles confronts a world going mad.
He may be recording himself out in the middle of nowhere on a beat-up guitar. But he knows perfectly well that there is no going back.
Although the past may inspire us in our struggle to move forward, as the example of Bob Dylan clearly does for Jesse Welles, making real progress requires that we stop believing in the magic of repetition.
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Screenshot courtesy of Jesse Welles. All rights reserved.