Over the past year, folk singer Jesse Welles has become an unlikely star thanks to protest songs about everything from ICE raids and the health care industry to the opioid epidemic and the invasion of Ukraine. And less than 24 hours after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University, Welles dropped a mournful ballad about the incident.
“For all of the bile/The bold talk,” he sings. “The venom/The hate and the lies/No one should be killed/No blood should be spilled/Charlie shouldn’t have died/Well you can’t hate the gun and love the gun that shot yer rival/You can’t be kind and wish pain upon a child.”
The 31-year-old Kirk was shot dead on Wednesday while speaking to students at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, at an event on Turning Point USA’s “American Comeback Tour.” He was shot in the neck by an unknown assailant, who has not yet been caught.
The song comments on the sickening glee that’s been spread in some corners in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. “I heard laughing,” he sings. “I heard glee/But it coulda been you/It coulda been me…Spin the wheel, if you don’t get killed/You wind up dead inside.”
Last month, Welles told Rolling Stone that he began writing songs to try to understand the crazy world around him. “What you’re listening to is me making sense of the news,” he said. “‘What is this fentanyl crisis? Let me break it down in terms I can deal with and I’ll make it rhyme.’”
He’s performed recently with John Fogerty and was introduced by David Matthews at Farm Aid. “I think he’s one of the best songwriters I’ve ever heard in my life,” Matthews said. “But he gives me hope and he’s unbelievable.”
But Welles is very careful not to make explicitly partisan statements. When Rolling Stone asked how he voted in the last election, Welles paused for 20 seconds and ultimately declined to comment. “I just…I didn’t know I’d be talking about that kind of thing,” he said.
Ultimately, he wants his music to be enjoyed by a vast audience, free of the partisan divide. “I think a lot of us are politically homeless,” he said. “We’ve been orphaned, and it’s likely that we have been since before I was born. It seems very apparent now, in a way that maybe it didn’t in the past, that nobody has your interests in mind. And now it feels like the first step in any kind of progress is unearthing the truth of the matter first, and we are arriving at that truth every day.”
