When Jesse Welles sold out tickets for his one night at the Basement East in about one day, I wonder if anyone considered adding two nights at the Ryman, too? When Jesse Welles took the stage at 8:30pm promptly, without an opening act, I tried to forget about buying two over-priced after-market tickets at the last minute (just in case the first one didn’t work). Then, once I was gratefully in the door, I was sending screenshots of the second ticket to strangers I met in a Facebook group, hoping one might use it. When Jesse Welles took the stage, my first thought was one I might have mumbled out loud: “He’s real. He’s not just the singer on my phone.”
Jesse Welles has taken on the world with a prolific catalog of tracks first-released to the thousands, sometimes millions of views, on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, wherever you get your daily dosage of the daily news sung directly to your brain to disrupt your daily doom-scroll. In passionate & prolific contrast to the likes of Oliver Anthony, Welles wields a more pure & passionate lefty populism not so easily co-opted by a country & an industry that instantly made Anthony a right-wing caricature of himself.
“Generational Tik tok Protest Singer” might be too fine a point & much more than any man of the moment can handle, but after feeling the palpable energy in that packed room in East Nashville on a Saturday in early March, that energy flowing between Welles & the crowd as tangible sparks of revolution & joy, I prayed to every possible force in the universe that Jesse Welles is no passing prophet, no gotcha gimmick, no here-today gone-tomorrow enigma to somehow get lost & maybe rediscovered in 50 years like Rodriguez was on Searching for Sugar Man. What if they had TikTok in urban Detroit when those first Rodriguez records got swallowed into the void so many decades ago?
It is actually an understatement to say that God (or the Universe or whatever) sent us Jesse Welles for such a time as this.
The John Prine-meets-Phil Ochs-meets Bob Dylan comparisons are flying as they should. When Welles sings songs like “Knockin On Heaven’s Door” & “Have You Ever Seen The Rain” faithfully & unironically like at your uncle’s bonfire & keg party, we know that he knows in which river he wades. But we also hear elements of Billy Bragg & Frank Turner, Utah Phillips & Willi Carlisle. I don’t think I’d necessarily call Jesse Welles folk-punk, but his entire songwriting & performing reality is steeping in a deliciously defiant courage & charisma that some have called “punk AF.”
So accustomed we are to entire audiences of audible yakety-yak all-yammering nonsense between songs, I am struck by the silence at the breaks between tracks, like in church or at a really good PhD lecture. So when people shout things into that tender abyss, Jesse hears & responds. One person yells “Jesse For President,” at which point we get one of the few stories of the night. He mentions how RFK Junior begged him to play at a rally. At that moment, I could feel all the tummies & anuses in the room clench in unison while we waited for him to finish the bit. We all untethered our clench & sighed in relief, when he confessed that he never answered the messages from RFK, then proceeded to make a poor-taste off-color jab at the entire Kennedy clan.
Then someone says loudly: “Thank you for singing the things we all want to say.” That was so beautiful that I immediately typed it into the setlist document that I always keep on my phone when at a show. Yes, times are scary. Yes, you could lose your job for being too outspoken, so it is more than refreshing & invigorating to feel-everything-in-your-bones with someone whose entire job is being this outspoken.
But when the woman said that, Jesse replied, “You mean, like Turtles?” This being a reference to his song about, yes, turtles. In addition to all his brave & blood-burning protest songs, Jesse Welles has an entire EP of all-natural feral-friendly Doctor Dolittle jams. On “All Creatures Great & Small,” he also has songs about Bugs, Trees, Squirrels, Whales, & Autumn. This could be a children’s album in the same spirit as Pete Seeger or John Denver, who actually gets a shout-out in the song “Let It Be Me.” I can even catch the vibe of early Ray Stevens’ songs in the Welles’ catalog, before Ray took a sharp right turn, something I hope that never happens to Jesse Welles.
As I was sitting down to type-up these reflections on last night’s show, I might have let Reddit suck my brain into one of the countless Welles threads, this one where people wanted to debate whether he was left or right or both or neither in terms of his politics. Somebody said he is down versus up, which makes sense. Another said he is definitely left, but since we also have no real offline political left in this country, Jesse’s leftism might be harder to identify, since most folks have probably never met a real leftist.
Jesse Welles knows me & knows my heart, puts words to everything I am feeling every morning when I wake up. He captures the need for class war in songs like “Walmart” & “The Poor.” His unapologetic anti-war messaging in “War is A God” & “War Isn’t Murder” are so pointed & poignant, so needed & frankly overdue.
I don’t think the cranky obnoxious peace-creep that was the Catholic Worker vegetarian-anarchist-pacifist Ammon Hennacy needed to be the “one man revolution in America” that Utah Phillips invokes in his track with Ani DiFranco about Hennacy. But in lieu of everyone everywhere joining the needed revolution against war, pollution, & greed, we might be stuck with a few more years of “one man” or “one woman” or one person revolutions, for times such as these, while the earth groans in anticipation.
Jesse Welles is a one-singer revolution in music & in life, he speaks to & for us. In his stage persona, he seems entirely comfortable in his own skin, leaning hard into his truest self when singing our hearts out of hiding & into these moments where we all feel empowered & seen. -Andrew/Sunfrog
.....written while chugging the morning after the show coffee on 3/9/25
Jesse Welles
Basement East
Nashville
3-8-2025
Solo acoustic:
Fat
WalMart
Whistle Boeing
Fentanyl
United Health
Cancer
The Poor
See Arkansas
Gilgamesh
Turtles
That Can’t Be Right
New Moon
Knockin On Heaven's Door (Dylan)
Saint Steve Irwin
Let It Be Me
Anything But Me
Bugs
With band (bass & drums & Jesse):
I'm Sorry
Domestic Error
Horses
God, Abraham, & Xanax
Have You Ever Seen The Rain (CCR)
Wheel
Fear is the Mind Killer
Encore
Middle
War Isn't Murder
No comments:
Post a Comment