That Guy From the Backyard

This week I did something different. I read the story out loud instead of making a song. Jesse Welles is a singer-songwriter, and a song of my own next to his story felt disrespectful. My friend and reader Mike Manchak also said the songs had run their course, and he’d love to hear me read one. So here you go. Press play, or read along right below.

Kymberlee got us seats in the first row of the mezzanine at the Wiltern in Los Angeles. From up there, the view was clear, and I could see the whole room. The floor below us has no seats. A few spots for people who need them, and everyone else stands. On Tuesday, October 6, that floor was packed with young people who had come to hear one man and one guitar.

It was a birthday present. We hadn’t been to a live concert in a long time. We found Jesse Welles the way most people do now, through a phone.

Here’s what I keep noticing about him. Ask people if they know Jesse Welles and a lot of them say no. Show them a photo of a guy with a mop of curly hair, standing in a clearing in the Ozarks with an acoustic guitar, and they say, “Oh, I know that guy. I love that guy.” The picture arrived before the name did.

The clearing indoors

Then I walked into the Wiltern and saw that somebody had carried the clearing indoors. A full-size steel power-line tower stood center stage, with glowing cables draped from the rig and a field of small stars behind it. The floor was grass, scattered with daisies. The light kept changing, purple and pink, then blue with a yellow haze, then red, then green with orange. At one point he stood alone in a single pool of light, wearing a ringer tee from Norman’s Rare Guitars, a harmonica on a neck rack, a setlist taped near the stand. Later the band joined him, piano and two guitars and drums and bass. All night the crowd kept tilting its faces up toward those cables.

His story is the reason the set makes sense. Welles grew up in Ozark, Arkansas, and got his first guitar from Walmart when he was about eleven. The Beatles got him going. He spent ten years as a working musician in rock bands in Nashville, released a debut album in 2018, and opened for bigger acts. None of it broke through. By late 2023, he was burned out on touring, and he put TikTok on his phone on a whim.

A hospital room

Then his father survived a heart attack. Welles sat in the hospital room with a Woody Guthrie biography in his lap and figured out what to do next. He started writing songs about what was happening in the world, and he filmed each one in a clearing cut for power lines near his home. Same spot, same guitar, same look straight into the camera. By late 2025, he had more than three million followers on TikTok and Instagram combined. He has been nominated for four Grammy Awards. The tower on that stage is the clearing, and the people in that room knew it.

I don’t write about politics, and I’m not starting here. I’m writing about what happens in a room when one person with a guitar says out loud what a lot of people have been carrying. That experience is old, and it’s real, and it doesn’t care which side of any issue you stand on.

How the songs are built

What I can tell you is how the songs are built. They’re dense. Four, five, six, seven verses, biting and satirical, each line packed tight, and the crowd knew the words. He says he writes when he has an opinion about something. He also writes about turtles, because he loves turtles. In 2019, he told an interviewer that he’d been writing songs since he was twelve and had around 339 unreleased tunes sitting in notebooks and on hard drives. So the overnight success had a very long night behind it.

I don’t know his process, and that’s what pulls at me. I was in a cover band in high school. We played the Beatles and songs like that, so I know how it feels to stand inside someone else’s songs. Writing them is another job entirely. Welles does it in front of a phone, then walks onto a stage like a man in his own living room. Dylan for the words. John Mayer for the hands and the ease. Nobody told me to see either of those in him. I saw it myself, from the first row of a balcony, before I’d read a word about him.

The fifty years

And then the fifty years folded up. When I was in high school, the Vietnam protests were on the news, and the music we listened to energized us. It told us we weren’t the only ones paying attention. Standing in that mezzanine, watching a young crowd sing every word back to a guy from Arkansas, I felt that again, the same charge, in a different century.

So here’s what I’d pass along. When a song finds you on your phone, go stand in a room with it. Take someone you love. Get there early, and look up at the cables.

Through Another Lens is also a podcast. Every Sunday Story comes with an audio version you can hear on Substack and wherever you get your podcasts.

Lyrics

Jesse Welles, “Horses.” Read the full lyrics on Genius: https://genius.com/Jesse-welles-horses-lyrics