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Well, there’s another tour finished, another chapter ended and in the books. You could say that about every tour that finishes on a high note, I suppose, but this one felt different. This one didn’t feel like “just another tour.” There was something about this one….

Of course, there’s something about a Jesse Welles show, too, something (maybe even several somethings) that makes Jesse’s shows different from those of any other performer – past or present. Yeah, I said it. Jesse himself is different from any other performer working today OR any performer we’ve ever seen before. Yep, I said that, too. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

Back to this tour that just finished, this sold-out international tour that just finished, in Jesse’s hometown. This tour that began in Australia – although the Oz dates did have to be moved up, so Jesse could attend the Grammys. And it wasn’t because, as many thought, he wanted to be on hand in case he won any of the four Grammys for which he was nominated (Best Folk Album for “Under the Powerlines,” Best Americana Album for “Middle,” Best Americana Roots Song for “Middle,” and Best Americana Performance for “Horses”). No, it was because they asked him to present. As it turned out, Jesse did not win a Grammy this year, but he was onstage presenting for more than 10 minutes. Just Jesse, all alone up there in his dapper all-black suit, seeming totally at ease, presenting for eight different awards, and reading acceptance speeches for three of them (sometimes lengthy acceptance speeches – lookin at you, The Cure).

But there’s Jesse up there, not even breaking a sweat…. as if jetting in from Australia and appearing onstage at the Grammys was something he’d done dozens of times. No biggie. It’s important to remember that Jesse announced the Under the Powerlines tour on August 19, 2025, before the Grammy nominations were announced. Post-Kimmel, but pre-Colbert. Pre-Joan Baez joining him onstage in San Francisco during the Middle Earth tour. Pre-Farm Aid 2025, their massive 40th anniversary celebration.

August 19, 2025. Twelve days after he dropped “Join Ice,” and a little over three weeks since his history-making appearance at the Newport Folk Festival. Although in Jesse Welles’s world, things were definitely picking up speed, still this tour announcement seemed not unlike the previous three tours he’d undertaken in this, the newest iteration of his career.

But even Jesse himself couldn’t have foreseen how quickly events were going to be moving for him in the very near future.

Jesse’s rising fame and his long-standing ability to crystallize in song form the pertinent events of the day (and to skewer the bad actors responsible for those events) combined to really push the wind up under his wings. It must’ve been a bit like riding an updraft, when the Grammy nominations were announced on November 7th, followed by their request for him to come be part of the show, and to perform in the pre-Grammy celebration of the songs of Neil Young.

And 2026 had barely gotten underway before that misguided “paramilitary operation” that, back in August, had earned itself a Jesse song (not usually a complimentary achievement) went into Minneapolis, and went into turbo-charged overdrive. Sadly, there was soon a new Jesse song, “Good vs Ice,” while his song “Join Ice” drew new listeners daily. Dreadful things were happening in America, happening quickly. More and more folks seemed to depend on Jesse to help them make sense of the awful events they were seeing. The public was assigning to him not just the burgeoning status of a rising talent in the music world, but that of cultural arbiter as well. Suddenly millions of people around the world were relying on Jesse to tell them the truth about current events, and to remind them of the moral certainty which this age all too often seems to have lost.

That’s a heavy weight for anyone’s shoulders to bear.

But it would seem that Jesse is uniquely qualified for just this very task.

Most of you reading this probably know something of Jesse’s history: how he saved up the money to buy his first guitar at age 12, how a kind neighbor named Harlan got him started on learning the basics, how he began home recording with the help of a classmate and said classmates’s recording software. How an undeniable affinity for music developed into his becoming a musical prodigy, and then a young man who felt compelled towards a life in music. How his initial dreams of achieving success as the front man of his own rock’n’roll band ended when Covid began. How he actually did try to stay away from music for a couple of years (other than teaching guitar to kids), but he just wasn’t able to do it.

How his dad had a heart attack in February of 2024, which led Jesse to a hospital bedside epiphany… while reading the autobiography of Woody Guthrie.

Although Jesse had been posting songs (mostly covers) to his brand new TikTok account since November of 2023, I mark this current iteration of Jesse’s career to have begun on April 18, 2024, when he began posting mostly originals to his newly scrubbed YouTube account (he left his Welles YouTube account intact, and it’s still up to this day). On April 18, 2024 he posted “War Isn’t Murder” to his YouTube account. He would post three more songs that April, nine in May, fifteen in June, fourteen in July, etc…. The new Jesse Welles Era had well and truly begun.

If you’re at all familiar with Jesse’s work, you know that he has incredible range – not only musically but lyrically as well. He’s comfortable tackling subject matter as sweet and simple as turtles, bugs, trees and vegetables, as brutal as governmental forces casually murdering people across the globe as well as citizens here in America (while shielding grapists and pita files from justice), as esoteric and ethereal as songs that explore our place as souls down here in the heavy gravity, and what it is we should really be doing with our soul-selves while we’re clomping around in these mortal bodies… He is a natural-born musician, can play anything he picks up, can play any piece of music by ear. He is an amazingly accomplished guitarist and a genius wordsmith with his lyrics, many having more layers than those famous wild onions he sings about. He is jaw-droppingly prolific, rapidly putting out tons of songs – good songs, worthy of repeated listening! And he is doing all of this today, putting out songs and albums and selling out tour after international tour, all while being an unsigned artist. I believe it is his very freedom from the shackles and demands of a recording contract (and he knows all about those) that has in no small part enabled his stunning success since 2024: he has the artistic freedom to do exactly as he pleases, with no one trying to steer him or ‘advise’ him or curtail him. He is free.

In late July of 2024, based on the growing success of his music on social media platforms, he announced his first tour of this new era, to test the waters, to see how high was the demand. The tickets became available on July 26, 2024, for the 8-date tour that autumn (Saratoga Springs NY [Farm Aid], New York City, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago). They sold out almost immediately, eliciting an online “Whoa, that was fast” from the man himself. The waters were good, and the demand was high.

Two more tours followed in 2025: the Fear is the Mind Killer tour (29 dates, from February 15 to May 14, including 5 European dates added on), and then the Middle Earth tour (19 dates, from September 20 to December 15, this time including 7 added-on European dates).

And in August of ’25 he announced the Under the Powerlines tour. As the paroxysms of a world in crisis intensified, so it seems did Jesse’s creative spirit grow to meet the moment.

For instance, he dropped “Masks Off” on December 30, 2025, a song that he would soon re-work into a chugging, charging rock’n’roll anthem for his live sets. The lyrics of this song and their rap-like, nearly staccato rapid fire delivery were unlike anything Jesse had ever done before. A blistering takedown of virtually everything that’s going wrong with America right now, Jesse calls out several Arkansas politicians by name. The song is packed with many examples of his trademark wordplay and pithy intensity: “the loogie of factions that the nation has hacked/ is boiling and festering and stabbing itself in the back.” The masks are off, indeed.

He followed that up with the song “Nothing” on January 13, 2026. A melancholy meditation on the inner sickness that drives a certain type of person to try to fill that hole in their soul with money or power, never being able to have enough of either – the song opens with a 48-second wicked bluegrass intro that segues into the body of the song by way of a few seconds of Edvard Grieg. You know, the usual. Lyrics include “crazy men with bloodshot eyes/ shoot their rockets in the sky/ drunk with power high with rage/ ..new men in the same old cage.”

And then on February 19, 2026, we were treated to the song “Whirlwind,” an angry whirlwind of a song that again calls out the failing leaders by name (“I’ll have what they’re having while they’re wreaking havoc/ The Floridian Lobotomy/ Hey Marco, Susie, Dr. Oz and Pam Bondi/ No one has each other’s backs/ Like the parasitic class/ You gotta admire the fire, the passion/ They have to cover each other’s ass”). And he does not spare the failing-leader-in-chief: “It ain’t 5-dimensional chess/ It’s dementia doing its best/ Ring a ding-ding/ You got the mad king/ And he’s mean/ When he’s depressed.”

Jesse was accompanied on the Under the Powerlines tour by the same group of musicians he had with him on his Middle Earth tour in the fall of 2025: Adam Meisterhans on slide guitar, Bobby Steinfeld on keyboards, Joel Parks on bass guitar and Connor Streeter on drums. He may have had his same crew with him but Jesse modified the live show a bit, tightening it up from four sets into three well-paced courses: first the solo acoustic set, bringing the band onstage at the end of “The Poor” on a crashing note that lights up the house as a gigantic American flag cascades down behind them, forming the backdrop for the rest of the night; then a rocking set with the full band, including that face-melting live version of “Masks Off”; then an expanded encore set, which begins with Jesse playing onstage alone with his acoustic, but brings the band back out for “Fear Is the Mind Killer” before Jesse is again alone to close out the night.

Beginning his tour on January 19 in Melbourne Australia, he spent a jam-packed 10 days down under, performing 9 shows in 5 different cities, stopping by to visit the Wiggles, and inviting Ambrose Kenny Smith of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard to join him onstage at his Perth gig, on January 28. It was in Australia that he first added the Black Sabbath song “Paranoid” to his live set, sending fans stateside into spasms of delighted rock’n’roll joy. His last show in Oz was January 29, in Adelaide, then he flew halfway around the world to be in Los Angeles in time to play at the “Pre-Grammy Salute to Neil Young” on January 31, at The Troubadour. The next day he was presenting at the Grammys.

The tour resumed in February, including a stop at the legendary Ryman Theater in Nashville. On this night, he and the band debuted their custom, matching pinstripe suits, which he has said was meant as a gesture of respect and recognition for this storied old venue.

The show in Boston at the House of Blues on March 6 was so thoroughly stunning and uproariously magnificent that Jesse posted the professionally-shot video of the entire concert to his YouTube account nineteen days later, on March 25. The whole show is a gem, from beginning to end, an outstanding evening set in a triumphant tour: all 5 of the boys were hitting their stride on this night in Boston, firing on all cylinders on every song, but none more so than “Masks Off”. Watching this video is like watching history in the making, history being made in real time, right before your eyes – watching a legend being born.

The UTPL tour included 2 consecutive nights in Minneapolis. With the events that had transpired in that city just a few weeks prior, expectations were high for these appearances, and Jesse did not disappoint. On March 12th, the first Minneapolis show, Jesse debuted a slight word change in the song “God, Abraham and Xanax”: from “Lord, is P-Diddy in trouble?” to “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fuckin war.” Just a slight change. The audience erupted with berserker ecstasy.

Jesse, after all, finds new and creative ways to say what we’re all thinking. It’s one of his specialties.

At the Berkeley show on March 21st, Jesse again welcomed a familiar special guest: Joan Baez. She came onstage (in a Jesse Welles t-shirt, no less) to join him in singing the song “No Kings”, which they recorded after their first performance together of the song at the November 4th show at the Fillmore in San Francisco. He was swinging back through California, and his pal Joan came out to share the stage for another special moment.

Every date brought him closer and closer to home, to the Fayetteville show which was set as the final show of the tour. After Berkeley there was San Diego, then Phoenix, then two nights in Texas, Austin and Dallas. And then… Fayetteville.

It should be apparent by now that Jesse’s star was rising like never before. He was gathering steam, broadening his influence, the increased visibility causing him to pick up new fans everywhere along the way. For someone who had been pursuing a musical dream for more than a decade, it must have been exciting, fulfilling – and ironic.

No one was more aware than the hometown crowd in Fayetteville of just how long Jesse had been working towards that night at the end of March. They had seen him through all his incarnations, all his rocking and rolling, all his hair lengths, all his crazy drive, energy and output. They’d seen him playing local coffee shops at the age of 18, seen him playing open mics here and there, seen him busking on the sidewalks and in front of stores. They’d seen him playing small clubs with his first band, and small clubs with his second band. Various classmates had bought CDs he’d burned himself, of him playing covers and original songs. Teachers remembered him fondly, coming to class with his guitar slung over his shoulder, taking part in poetry slams, winning contests that bought him studio time to pursue his calling with his bands. Family members and old bandmates, of course, had always had a front row seat to the Jesse show, and everyone, everyone very much wanted to see him succeed – no matter how long it took.

So when he joked from the stage that night that he had played a lot of shows at that venue (“for tens of you”), he wasn’t kidding. But Jesse hadn’t played a show in his hometown since 2023. His hometown crew had just had to watch as their guy went out into the world again, alone this time (at least at first), and started up the latest iteration of his already-long career. This was the first time he’d brought the show back home to them since he’d started posting those YouTube videos, back in April of 2024. They’d only been watching from home, watching on their phones as their guy started to blow up… and up… and up……

So the show in Fayetteville wasn’t just another show. The Under the Powerlines tour wasn’t just another tour. The return to his hometown was a victorious and long-awaited validation, for himself and for everyone else who was paying attention, that yes, Jesse is in fact the real deal and yes, he is where he should be, doing exactly what he should be doing. All along, all through those many years, he was always doing just exactly what he should have been doing. If he is still wondering if he’s really real, if he’s still having trouble feeling self-assured, I sincerely hope that the evening of March 28th at the Ozark Music Hall in Fayetteville finally put all of that doubt behind him, for good.

Jesse’s is a talent like no other. No other musical artist of the modern age, or any age, has the incredible scope, range or expertise that he does (from rock to folk to blues to country to jazz to electronica, or some totally original mash-up thereof, of his own creation), or the ability to write lyrics that are simply poetry, sometimes cleverly folded in on themselves with multiple meanings, sometimes abrupt and forthright, and almost always with a touch of humor. Jesse’s skill as a musician also knows no bounds; although still a young man, he has been perfecting his musical art for more than 20 years, literally since childhood. When he’s at his best, the music flows through him almost as if he’s not even there – he nearly becomes the music itself, music standing up there on stage, in shoes. The shows can feel more like revival meetings than music shows; just being in the presence of this genuine artist, this authentic talent, this light blazing away like no other has a way of blissing people out, and bringing them together in shared experiential joy. No other musical artist past or present has all of this AND also the preternatural prolificity that has always been a hallmark of Jesse’s work, the drive that sometimes has him posting multiple original songs within the span of a week. Multiple original GOOD songs.

On paper, all of this seems almost too good to be true. But true it is, as true as the words of the plain-spoken Arkansan citizens from which he hails. THEY know how incredible Jesse is, they’ve known for years. When you first encounter him and his music, it does take a while to truly take it all in, to actually realize just exactly what it is you’re dealing with, how ginormous is this talent carried by this brilliant, humble man. It takes a minute to grasp. But his homies always knew, from the time he was little… And they finally, at the end of March 2026, got to witness in person the beginning of his true flowering, that big old soul flower finally blossoming, like they always knew it would.

Jesse is no longer outside the gates of the compound crying ‘Let me in.’ He is walking in his rightful place at last, the place that was always his birthright, and by now, having honestly and fully earned the privilege of strolling about the grounds of that heady compound, taking in all the wonders and meeting all the cool folks that he knew were there to be met, all along. Jesse is finally home, in more ways than one, and where he’ll go from here…. well, that’s gonna be a sight to see. Hang on tight, because you don’t want to miss even a minute of it.