Jesse Welles

A Walmart guitar and a decade of other names

Jesse Allen Breckenridge Wells was born on 22 November 1992 in Ozark, Arkansas, and grew up in the north-west of the state, where he still lives. He was, by his own account, more promising on a football field than on a stage as a teenager. The guitar arrived at eleven — a First Act from Walmart — and he taught himself on it, helped along by a neighbour, Harlen Nichols, who wrote out homemade tablature for him. The Beatles and John Lennon's playing were the first obsession; Dylan, Nirvana, Motown and country came after, alongside a reading habit that runs to Whitman, Melville, Twain and Cormac McCarthy.

From 2012 he put homemade recordings on SoundCloud and Bandcamp under his own surname and played in a band called Dead Indian. He recorded prolifically as Jeh Sea Wells through the middle of the decade, moved to Nashville in 2015 to work with the producer Dave Cobb, and put out an EP, Codeine, on C3 Records in 2017. The following year came the real shot: Red Trees and White Trashes, released on 15 June 2018 through 300 Entertainment under the single name Welles. It was a loud, grunge-inflected rock record, it drew serious critical notice — an NPR critic reckoned it had the heft to earn Grammy attention — and it did not break him. The Welles band persisted, quietly, until 2023.

The clearing under the power lines

The turn came through a phone camera. Welles had been posting cover songs on TikTok in 2023 and 2024 when his father had a heart attack, and the material sharpened into something else: topical folk songs about health insurance, microplastics, fentanyl, the Olympics, the war in Gaza. He filmed them himself in a clearing near his home that exists only because power lines run through it — far enough from the road that traffic does not intrude on the take, near enough that he does not have to carry a guitar far.

The format was dictated by the platform and he has never pretended otherwise. "I'm going to squeeze as much of these thoughts as I can down into 90 seconds, which was the length of a Instagram reel," he told NPR in an interview broadcast on 26 April 2026. The songs that took hold — "War Isn't Murder", "The Poor", "Cancer", "That Can't Be Right" — did so in millions. "United Health", written after the killing of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson in December 2024, was the one that made the jump from music feeds to news bulletins.

Recognition from inside the folk world followed fast. He played Farm Aid in September 2024, introduced by Dave Matthews as one of the best songwriters he had ever heard. He was on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in April 2025. He has since performed alongside John Fogerty and recorded in the studio with Joan Baez, who has become a friend — though he told NPR he has no illusions about reaching that scale of fame.

Eight albums in two years

The recorded output since has been relentless. Middle arrived in February 2025 and remains the record critics reach for first. Devil's Den followed on 22 August 2025, performed and produced entirely by Welles across five days in a cabin in the Ozarks. Between them came Pilgrim, With the Devil, an EP called No Kings, and the Under the Powerlines series — collections of the field recordings and live takes that built the audience in the first place, the first instalment running to 63 songs. A third instalment, covering January to June 2025, appeared in 2026.

The sixth studio album, Masks Off, was announced on 22 May 2026 and released in June. Eddie Spear produced it, and it was cut quickly in three sessions squeezed between tour dates — eleven tracks that pair studio versions of stage staples like "Join Ice", "Red" and "Domestic Error" with more interior writing in "Siddhartha" and "This and Not Some Other Way". Welles was explicit about the title: it came, he said, out of the ICE surge in Minnesota, the abduction of Venezuela's leader and a post-DOGE world in which "the masks are off, and they're doing things in broad daylight without caring".

The reviews were warmer about the execution than the ambition. Glide Magazine praised the guitar playing and the balance of vulnerable and observational writing but concluded the record offered little beyond the artist's norm, leaning on familiarity and current buzzwords, and read more as a gift to existing listeners than a door for new ones.

Where he stands in September 2026

The 68th Grammy Awards in February 2026 brought four nominations at once: Best Folk Album for Under the Powerlines (April 24 – September 24), Best Americana Album for Middle, Best American Roots Song for "Middle" and Best Americana Performance for "Horses". He lost the folk album category to I'm With Her's Wild and Clear and Blue. Onstage in Boston that March he admitted he could not name his own nominations. CBS profiled him on 1 February 2026, where his sister's verdict on his voice — that it sounds like burnt toast, though burnt toast is still edible — got an airing.

Americana has adopted him. He took the Spirit of Americana / Free Speech Award on 10 September 2025 and was nominated for Emerging Act of the Year the same night. A year on, at the Americana Honors & Awards at the Ryman Auditorium on 16 September 2026, he was up for Artist of the Year against Brandi Carlile, Margo Price, Charley Crockett and Molly Tuttle. Tuttle won. Welles performed alone, guitar and harmonica, playing "The Nerd Reich", a song he had only released on 31 August 2026 and which was already stuffed with that month's headlines.

The touring has scaled accordingly. The Under the Powerlines run, announced on 19 August 2025, took in the Ryman, the 9:30 Club, Massey Hall, First Avenue and Stubb's between 23 February and 28 March 2026. The Red Tour — named after a track on Middle — was announced on 19 March 2026, opened on 24 July at Avondale Brewing Company in Birmingham, Alabama, and closes on 26 October at KEMBA Live! in Columbus, Ohio, with Steph Strings, Ratboys and Hudson Freeman supporting at selected dates. The remaining autumn stretch is the heaviest of his career: the Wiltern in Los Angeles, the Anthem in Washington, the Met in Philadelphia, Roadrunner in Boston, plus festival slots at Zilker Park in Austin in early October.

What the stage looks like now

A Welles show in 2026 is built as an alternation rather than a build. He opens alone with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica rack, working through the songs that made him — at Val Air Ballroom in West Des Moines on 19 August the opening block ran "Walmart", "Fat", "Philanthropist", "Fentanyl", "The List", "United Health" and "The Poor" back to back — then brings a band on for the electric material and drops back to solo twice more before the end.

The band sections are where the rock career resurfaces: "Join Ice", "Red", "Domestic Error", "Horses", "Technopagans". The covers are chosen for argument as much as affection — Black Sabbath's "War Pigs", Nirvana's "Come as You Are", "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", "Take Me Home, Country Roads", and a tour debut of Radiohead's "Creep" in Des Moines. The staging is minimal and used once: reviewing the Citizens House of Blues show in Boston on 6 March 2026, the Boston Globe's sister title described the band slipping offstage after "The Poor" as strobes came up and a large American flag dropped behind him.

Not everything lands. The same Boston review found the pace — more than fifteen songs delivered without pause or explanation — left little room to breathe, and wanted more from Welles between numbers about what the songs meant. He tends to refuse that on principle, arguing that explaining a song takes the listening away from the audience.