TikTok folk hero Jesse Welles: “I’m trying to find a through-line that’s honest”

Jesse Welles looks into his phone, fiddling with it for a moment as blue skies and early spring sunshine fight to be seen over his shoulder. Once he’s settled, a green expanse comes into view behind him, the light clipping the surface of a body of water. Anyone who’s kept track of his rise to viral fame as a folk firebrand for the TikTok crowd might expect his guitar to swoop into the frame next, followed by a short, sharp song that dissects the grim realities of modern America.

But on this day in April, he’s not wandering the woodland around his Arkansas home with something to get off his chest. Instead of an acoustic, he’s clutching a gas station coffee cup, standing on the side of the road during a long drive between Fort Collins, Colorado and Dallas, Texas. Welles is on a North American tour, having spent a couple of weeks transposing those star-making tracks from wilderness musings into the sort of polemics that can unite a packed room in real time. What’s it been like, putting faces to the thousands of names littering the comments sections beneath videos of him “singing the news”? “It’s like meeting a pen pal or something,” he tells NME.

Welles, a shaggy-haired 30-year-old out of Ozark (population 3,000 and change), has logged enough hours in the music biz to take this latest twist in his stride. Since the world first heard his weatherbeaten voice more than a decade ago, he’s been a few different things: a prolific solo artist under the name Jeh Sea Welles, the frontman of groups called Dead Indian and Cosmic-American, and a major label prospect as simply Welles, whose 2018 album ‘Red Trees and White Trashes’ first threatened to get him over. That it didn’t was almost a mortal blow.

But second, third and fourth chances can be found in unusual places. Burned out on touring and feeling like he’d swung hard and missed, Welles installed TikTok on his phone on a whim in late 2023. Keeping things low stakes at first, he fooled around by uploading snippets of original writing alongside covers of formative songs by Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Grateful Dead. But after his father had a heart attack, it all shifted.

His process became more deliberate as he began fashioning the events of the day, in all their dispiriting glory, into prickly folk numbers. Welles was working through the emotions of seeing a parent in need, and used these songs as a complementary means to think over the madness and anxiety of a society clinging, white-knuckled, onto the precipice. “It really is just me making sense of it,” he says.

Often standing amid rippling leaves and snaking power lines in a manner that suggested grounding – not only in a tradition, but on soil that will outlive any headline – Welles has delivered verses about Gaza, about the ghoulish nature of corporate healthcare, about Signal leaks. “If players in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s had to rely on a 45 in order to get their record out,” Welles says, “my 45 was the 90-second reel.”

Welles’ new approach struck a chord in a big way. As his likes and follower numbers climbed into the millions at a dizzying clip, he was held up by listeners as a protest singer in the vein of Dylan, Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie. “I suppose folks will compare you to what they are familiar with,” he says, downplaying that sort of talk. “The only way any artist is ever going to make it is to be completely themselves,” he considers. “It was a road to Damascus moment, a bright light that hit. I realised I don’t need to be anybody but what I want to be.”

From the outside, though, the process of “singing the news” seems like hard graft: doom-scrolling fashioned into a creative pursuit and, eventually, a living that requires Welles stay switched on. But he doesn’t see it that way. “I’ve always paid attention to the news,” he says. “It was always on when I was a kid. Really, what you’re looking at is me trying to get to the root of what is going on. There’s a lot of pretense, a lot of performance and manipulation, that goes into broadcasting what we call the news. So, I’m trying to find a through-line that’s honest.”

The opening song on Welles’ latest record ‘Middle’ takes this philosophy and spins it into three minutes of chiming folk-rock. ‘Horses’ dates back to one of Welles’ earliest TikTok experiments; he played it in his late-night television debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in March. Its chorus finds him “singing this song about loving all the people that you’ve come to hate”. Locating a sting in the tail of some boilerplate hippie talk, he draws attention to the chasm that exists between left and right on every topic of consequence. It’s in that empty space that Welles has set out his stall.

“Most likely the path is down the middle,” he says. “When you do decide that’s going to be the way through living, then it poses the question, ‘Well, how will I alleviate the discomfort that comes with riding down the middle?’ If I’ve decided that that is the path that’s the most honest, well, the salve or the balm that you’re going to have to apply is love, in order to not lose your mind there, or not be tempted to join a tribe.”

“I realised I don’t need to be anybody but what I want to be”

‘Horses’, though, is one of relatively few songs with a political bent on ‘Middle’. Instead, the record serves up material that is more personal, even esoteric, and founded upon collaboration with a band. That the album was dropped in tandem with ‘Under The Powerlines’ – a monster project containing 60 examples of his backwoods writing, their titles accompanied by recording dates for maximum context – only seemed to highlight the difference in approach.

“I’m always writing both [kinds of songs],” Welles observes. “I’ve got my tunes that are near to me, that are me exploring what it means to be alive, and then there are the tunes of me trying to make sense of the news, or at least trying to make it rhyme. ‘Middle’ is a collection of tunes that I was working on for myself. It’s my jazz, you know?”

Taking in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, London and Dublin, Welles’ ongoing European tour is a chance to see how his jazz reverberates a few thousand miles from home. The tour has been sold out since February, underlining the universal desire to see their confusion and anger channelled into song. “Dylan was probably more liked over there than he was at home,” Welles says with a laugh. “And that’s just the way life goes – you’ll never be cool in your hometown.”

But he can also admit there’s more to it than that. The American lineage that the comments section sees him in is mirrored by protest music of equal and greater potency in every country where six strings have been pulled tight across a couple of planks of wood. “Globally and historically, that’s where I become intrigued,” Welles says. “More than an American tradition, I think it’s a human tradition: writing and finding the truth, teasing it out of the wool.”

Jesse Welles’ ‘Middle’ and ‘Under The Powerlines’ are out now.

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