I Protest His Protest Song, or Why Jesse Welles Is Bad—And Bad for Us

Plus an Interview with Willie Nelson

Welcome to the second edition of Out + Back, featuring an essay about the damage done by the so-called protest songs of Jesse Welles. Before that, two orders of business. First, I interviewed Willie Nelson for GQ, which you can read here. Second, a correction from the first edition: My wife, Tina, says I have watched Bad Santa at least three times. Give me three weeks, and that number will become four.

I will begin with a caveat: If you have occasionally liked a song by the so-called protest singer Jesse Welles, I do not hold it against you. In his videos, he stands in a now-verdant patch of weeds, a break that some power crew long ago cut into the woods in order to build utility lines. From his perch, Welles broadcasts all the welcome signifiers of the venerable folk singer: the back-to-nature (sort of?) setting, the little guitar he’s pounded so much some varnish has vanished, a vocal rasp that suggests he’s hopped train cars and swallowed a few hundred cigarettes. He looks good, too, unkempt auburn bangs sweeping just shy of piercing eyes and rock-climber arms partially concealed by a button-up. You’re mad about the world, and here is a strong-jawed Southerner scorching ICE. Go ahead, tap the heart.

And no matter how much I disagree, I’m not even mad if you’re one of those constant commenters that tells Welles he is the next Dylan or the only musician speaking truth to power these days. I spend too much of my own time leaving comments on the Instagram account of a little black cat named Baby Corn, who wobbles when he walks, has an actual flattop, and always seems to be covered in food. We all find our ways to muddle through, somehow.

But I have now seen so many folks call Welles the new Dylan or Prine or, god help us, Cohen that I am compelled to say it plainly: Not only is Jesse Welles a subpar songwriter who shouldn’t be allowed to sharpen the pencils of a few dozen peers I could name by the time I finish typing this rather long sentence, but I also believe his protest songs and his car-crash politics are actively counterproductive for thinking our way out of this moment’s mess, or even trying. As Bill Callahan put it about some other white guy with a guitar: “I protest his protest song.”

Dreamy!!

Welles is the perfect modern protest songwriter only in the sense that he laments everything that seems to have more power than he does while picking on ostensible neighbors over whom he somehow feels righteous. Walmart and Walmart customers, GLP-1s and their apparently self-hating users, Donald Trump and Joe Biden and Elon Musk and all the stupid suckers who go to college: He makes targets of them all without so much as suggesting a solution or, more importantly, writing about a future where such solutions may even exist. His songs are voids of empathy, imagination, vulnerability, and emotions other than cheap humor and unaimed rage. They are, in that sense, barely songs at all; they are merely content, a post-able proxy for our endless discontent.

“Certain forms of art get criticized for being escapist,” Brian Eno wrote in the brilliant book What Art Does. “But what’s wrong with escaping? What’s wrong with wanting to experience another reality that is better than this one?” Welles’ artless output only pouts in the present, imagining nothing as it only restates the obvious.

If you find yourself here, there is a decent chance you don’t need a biographical reintroduction to Jesse Allen Breckenridge Wells, who turned 33 days before Thanksgiving. But his neat narrative frames his long-standing careerist ambitions and the vaporousness of his current grandstanding bit, so it’s worth revisiting. Welles grew up in northwest Arkansas, a mesmeric expanse of low-slung mountains and limestone wonders and a sort of ecotone of the South, the Midwest, and the Great Plains. Welles (he added the “e” a few years back, because…?) repeatedly and hyperbolically insists in interviews that his homeland was 30 years behind the times and that he fell in love with the oldies (Sabbath, Gladys Knight, the Beatles) and bought his first guitar at 11 from Walmart, the mega-chain founded maybe an hour upstate in Bentonville. He soon found Dylan’s debut and the Anthology of American Folk Music in the local library. He was that kid who carried his guitar everywhere, and he made a lot of records by the time he turned 22.

He then headed to Nashville, started a bro-grunge band called Welles, and inked a deal with a company that had a lot to do with very big rap but very little to do with the folk songs of the American South or, really, the rock songs of Welles. The band grinded, playing SXSW in 2018 and shouting out Taco Bell and Walmart in video interviews in 2019. Writing for NPR, Ann Powers even said Welles’ debut was “likely [to] earn a few Grammy nominations,” but that never happened. Instead, Covid happened, Welles disbanded, and he went home to, as he has often put it, not make music anymore.

But that hirsute seer of we-the-people, white-hot, white-man rage, Oliver Anthony, caught his attention in 2023. “Rich Men North of Richmond” suggested to Welles that he could record himself singing somewhere pretty and use social media to bypass the bureaucratic channels of music distribution that had previously failed his band. (Also, though the Fudge Rounds quip truly sucks, “Rich Men” is better, as a song, than anything Welles has yet committed to Reels, because it’s structurally sound and works to conjure a world beyond its mere grievance.) He started doing so with the kind of covers you might expect, but his father’s subsequent heart attack encouraged him to take up another lesson from Anthony, a friend apparently so close he now calls him Chris: “I started singing the news.”

And … subversive?!

Welles first mocked that disastrous Biden-versus-Trump debate, calling out the “geriatric narcissistic oligarch Olympics” and scorning people for giving themselves lobotomies instead of actual electoral choices. These songs have made him famous; the songs that aren’t about current events, epitomized by this year’s tellingly titled Middle, sound like the absolute dregs of Desire, had Dylan made it on half-caff and not full speed.

A decade ago, in an interview that was at least partially about Cat Power, Greil Marcus rightly said, “I really think that the engine, the motor, of Dylan’s best work is empathy.” Empathy, at least as I experience it, is also an act of imagination—the ability not only to put yourself in someone’s actual position but also to consider another and potentially better position for everyone, to mentally render a future that does not yet exist. Empathy and imagination are a caduceus, bound around the bar of experience. “I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours” was, at 22, Dylan’s consummate invitation to share a more magnanimous future with someone, anyone, everyone. The truly masterful work of his so-called topical era achieves this: his songs put him in a position of less power and then force him to imagine his way—our way—toward something else.

If I were being truly petty, I would call Welles a humdrum end-rhymer with zero sense of character development or plotlines, the acoustic equivalent of a punchline rapper who occasionally gets in a pretty good quip. (Oops.) But my real problem is how little empathy and imagination he brings into his work. His specialty, really, is songs that are simply mean. In “Walmart,” he makes jokes of a toddler eating a cigarette, a dorky manager doing his best to hold a job, and a poor family of 33 red-headed kids on the hunt for a good deal they can afford. In “Join ICE,” his target is a test-failing quasi-incel who has been picked on his entire life, never made to feel worthwhile about anything he’s ever done. In “War Isn’t Murder,” he follows Dylan into one of his own worst early lyrical traps—pointing fingers with a sardonic Biblical resolve, damning anyone too stupid to realize they are damning others. Welles and I both come from Southern places frequently maligned for a rotten heritage and enduringly bad politics; I feel like he should know that turning the people there into punchlines never works.

Welles is also writing about politics with, as far as I can tell, no actual understanding of what his politics are aside from an unerring antipathy for the people or systems that might have power. He demurred when Rolling Stone asked him about his vote in the 2024 presidential election: “I just … I didn’t know I’d be talking about that kind of thing.” I don’t actually care if Welles voted for Trump or Biden or Jill Stein or Air Bud, but if I’m listening to a guy who has at last found his career in music by singing about politics, I’d like to know that he has enough confidence in his convictions to justify whatever choice he made only a year ago. It is a fitting answer, though, for someone whose songs have smacked of pernicious bothsidesism from the start, when he put the two presidential candidates on the same embarrassing footing. Welles writes like a guy whose politics could change the moment it becomes professionally expedient. It’s easy to imagine him not having an audience had Kamala Harris won in November 2024; it is also painfully easy to imagine him having a massive audience had Kamala Harris won in November 2024.

Welles loves to criticize big business, from those who peddle fast food to those who manufacture Ozempic. But in “Walmart,” he repeatedly distances himself from a solution for curbing rapacious capitalism by commanding, “Don’t go misunderstand me for some pinko commie rat.” Why not actually stand up for something, man? I don’t think “Join ICE” is particularly bold, either. It’s a series of punchlines directed at a person who has always failed, centered on a series of Trump policies that are proving increasingly unpopular and illegal. Welles lambasts the henchmen rather than defend the immigrants living their lives, a deceptively apolitical position that’s good for laughs but not good for building a better world. When Welles played “Join ICE” on Colbert a few weeks back, the crowd cheered during the middle as if they had been hit with some great awakening. It was the simple sound of self-satisfaction, shrill and empty.

And Welles’ absolutist free-speech appraisals of Charlie Kirk’s assassination correctly defended people’s rights to be freaks but then conflated that with the “freedom to say you hate it.” Fuck that, unequivocally; that is how power imbalances get perpetuated, how the vulnerable forever remain under the boot. (Steven Hyden has opined about this song, too, and I thank him for his service.) Welles didn’t particularly mourn UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in song, simply singing, “Now CEOs come and go and one just went.” He, instead, waited for his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast to do that, bemoaning schadenfreude rather than bothering to tell the host that calling people “faggots,” even in jest, isn’t that cool, dude.

Also, for such a self-proclaimed champion of the little guy, going on a Spotify-propped podcast to tout your new album is a dashingly hypocritical and self-serving choice, especially amid a then-mounting boycott. This should come as no surprise. Welles, after all, writes about politics not with a core or an actual moral compass but instead with an uncanny sense of convenience: What bit of the news are people most riled up about right now? Let’s do that. It appears that he moves through the music industry that way, too. His protest is a prop.

A few days ago, an old friend texted to ask me about my politics, if they had somehow started to skew right after years of ardent activism in my native North Carolina. The question, I eventually learned, stemmed not from anything I had done but simply from the fact that I didn’t post enough political stories on Instagram. It was then that I fully understood the power of Welles: He makes shareable content that makes us feel good about politics we might not actually possess. He makes it easy to have a take without actually doing that much work. It is a virtue signal that disappears after 24 hours, soon becoming what it already was: more or less, nothing.

Though singing the news is a proud global folk tradition, as Welles surely heard during his early days with the Anthology of American Folk Music, I don’t think that’s what this country needs in 2025. I think we need art that imagines a way through and out, an art that does more than point fingers in songs that are barely written, an art that dares to dream about the escape. But pointing fingers is all that Jesse Welles—the reply-guy of folk songs, the protest singer not that we need but maybe that we deserve—ever does. His songs, if I must call them that, go nowhere. They won’t get us anywhere, either.