The bard from Arkansas mixes protest with his signature wit and musicianship in a red-hot show beside the lake.

Jesse Welles may only be 33, but he’s got the bio of a musician much older. From his early days growing up in Arkansas steeped in Dylan, Nirvana and The Beatles to his early bands focused on metal and punk rock, Welles is better known these days as a protest singer of sorts.

All of that was on full display Saturday night on the shores of Dillon Reservoir where Welles and his crack touring band delivered a blistering two hours of music at Dillon Amphitheater. Since I last saw him at the Bluebird in the spring of 2025, Welles has solidified his status as the musical bard of the No Kings/anti-fascist movement, targeting everything from microplastics and health care to ICE, war and more in his lyrics.

Welles has been compared to everyone from John Prine and Dylan to Woody Guthrie and even Kurt Cobain. But since about 2023, he’s carved out his own unique niche as an artist who demands to be paid attention to as he sings about injustice with material that’s as funny as it is laser-focused on the bullshit that’s staring us all in the face.

And while many may know him from his iconic YouTube videos where it’s just him in a field singing his latest with an acoustic guitar, his full-band shows are not to be missed. It reminded me of when I saw Jason Isbell in the early days with the 400 Unit — a master singer-songwriter and virtuoso guitarist with a backing band adding significant punch to the material.

But he also does a fair number of songs with just himself, his guitar and a harmonica, with the band gradually filtering back onstage to color in the rest of the sonic spectrum. This transition was pulled off beautifully when one of his acoustic sets was followed by the full band plowing through a blazing jam of “Join ICE” — one of Welles’ most damning songs of the Trump era. That led to his mocking take on the billionaire hubris of the Elon Musks of the world in “SpaceXplosion” and “Masks Off” from his new album, an indictment of the powers that be running rampant and no longer caring who knows or sees.

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Jesse Welles having some fun atop the keyboards Saturday night at Dillon Amphitheater. | Photo: Alex Miller

A wandering musical palette

If Welles has proven one thing in the past few years it’s that he’s one of the most industrious songwriters out there. Along with his one-off topic-of-the-week YouTube songs, he’s been a one-man record factory in recent years: Two albums in 2024, six in 2025 and two so far this year.

Even with all that original work, he and the band found time for plenty of other material at the show in Dillon: Two from Nirvana (“Heart Shaped Box” and “Come as You Are”), John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” Black Sabbath’s timeless “War Pigs” and even a dip in the Beatles’ pond with an inspired (and wholly unexpected) “Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds.”

But where he connects with the crowd the most is always with his own material, evoking in equal parts his love for America and his deep disappointment in how it’s being managed. Never one to settle for metaphor or oblique references, Welles goes straight for the jugular with lyrics skewering everything from Walmart and United Health to wealth inequality, endless wars and the gaslighting that goes on to make us believe it’s all normal.

It was all there in Dillon, with Welles ending the show alone on stage with the stinging refrains of “War Isn’t Murder”:

War isn’t murder/good men don’t die

Children don’t starve/and all the women survive

‘War isn’t murder’ that’s what they say

When you’re fighting the devil/murder’s OK