Jesse Welles on creating your own music industry
Photo by Joey Lusterman
Jesse Welles is one of today’s most dynamic young singer-songwriters—a folk-rock troubadour clearly in the tradition of Guthrie, Dylan, Prine, and Ochs (and Cobain too) yet also very much of this moment.
Welles is such a gifted and versatile writer, and his output is mind-boggling—at this writing, he’s released seven full-length albums and an EP, in addition to posting countless off-the-cuff song videos, over a period of about 18 months...all while also playing completely sold-out cross-country tours.
I was thrilled to have the opportunity to interview Welles for Acoustic Guitar and learn more about his path. Read an excerpt here. Find the complete feature in the September/October 2025 issue and online.
My sense is that the earlier phase of your career, when you played in bands and were on a label, left you with a lot of cynicism about the music business. How are you approaching all that differently now?
In general, a lot of life is figuring out what you don’t want to do. Usually it’s by doing the things you don’t want to do that you realize that’s not what you want to do, even though that’s all you ever wanted to do up until that point. All I ever wanted to do was to be on a label and play in a rock ’n’ roll band.
It’s dangerous, thinking of the music industry as this kind of abstract industry. That in itself will make you cynical, and it can make you treat people like a part of a thing, instead of as people. Once you realize that some of these abstractions we’ve gotten comfortable with and even grown fond of railing against, once you realize that they’re made up of individuals and people, then the monster, the boogeyman, the shadow disappears—and the light comes on. And I feel like once that happens, you can find the people that you would like to be around, that you would like to be creative with.
I don’t think that’s a view I had when I was a kid. You don’t have to play the game anymore. It’s the wild west out there.
So you can build your own community around what you do?
It’s an à la carte buffet, man. The bigger you build it, the more people you’ll meet. What music industry? Make your own industry, your own factory. Your factory might just be your house in a subdivision in Arkansas. That’s my industry. I hired my cat.
