Jesse Welles sang about politics and insects — and covered Black Sabbath and Bob Dylan — at the Met Philly

Jesse Welles’ fans demonstrate their affection in the normal pop music ways.

At the Met Philly on Friday night, they rose to their feet and sang along to songs like “Fentanyl” and “Fear Is the Mind Killer,” and waved arms overhead as instructed by the Ozark, Ark.,-born songwriter.

And after Welles and his band capped off a 24-song set with Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Have You Ever Seen The Rain?,” the crowd called him back on stage for a triumphant three-song solo acoustic encore.

But there’s also another component in the relationship between the skinny songsmith with a big messy mop of curly locks. Welles performed on North Broad Street on a stage designed to evoke the title of the three Under the Powerlines albums he’s released in the last year and a half, which between them include 124 songs.

That added element is gratitude, which the packed house displayed at the Met with frequent shout-outs. During quiet moments between songs Friday, the most popular words that fans bellowed at the top of their lungs weren’t “I love you!” or even “Go Birds!”

They were “Thank you, Jessie!,” a show of appreciation for the role Welles, 33, has cast himself in as a topical troubadour carrying on the protest-song tradition of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, whom he teamed with last year on the protest anthem “No Kings.”

Welles had a decade-long journeyman’s career under various monikers until he found his metier in 2024 with an old-school solo guitar (and, sometimes, harmonica) performance style disseminated in two-minute clips ideally suited to go viral on TikTok.

Talking back to the Trump administration and singing out on hot-button topics has fueled the froggy-voiced Welles’ ascendancy. With tunes like “United Health” and “War Isn’t Murder,” about the human cost of the war in Gaza, which was the show closer on Friday, Welles has rapidly moved up the venue food chain.

Early in 2025, Welles played an intimate gig at the World Cafe Live — before that venue entered crisis mode — in a show that featured a guest appearance by Matt Quinn of Mt. Joy, with whom he first recorded the CCR cover mentioned above.

By this spring, he had moved up to the 2,500-capacity Fillmore in Fishtown. He did a pop-up show at Race Street Pier in June, a performance that spawned a TikTok of him leading a “This Land Is Your Land” singalong under the shadow of the Ben Franklin Bridge.

Now, Welles’ following has swelled to the size of the 3,500-capacity Met, and his visibility has grown with late-night TV appearances and as a regular at the annual Farm Aid concerts, where Dave Matthews introduced him as “one of the best songwriters I’ve ever heard in my life” in 2024.

At the Met, Welles began the show in solo troubadour mode with a six-song burst of pointed tunes that get their satirical perspective across, at their best, with nimble language and sharp-eyed humor without settling for lazy sloganeering.

The best of that opening salvo was “Nerd Reich,” a song inspired by Gil Duran’s new book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.

In it, Welles expressed exasperation at life in Donald Trump’s America with lyrics like “I get weary, I get nervous / They hired a clown, we get the whole damn circus.” And he also got some amusing zingers off, referring to Vice President J.D. Vance as “a carbon-based life-form in khaki pants.”

But Welles know better than to limit himself to being a purely political artist, or an entirely one-dimensional musician.

He followed his opening solo set by bringing out four bandmates — guitarist Adam Meisterhans, bassist player Joel Parks, drummer Connor Streeter, and keyboard player Bobby Steinfeld — and immediately plugging in and rocking out at high volume.

The eight-song section of the show that followed included a cover of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.” It was highlighted by “Join Ice,” a faux Department of Homeland Security recruitment song that advertises for would-be bullies.

“There’s a holein my soul that just rages,” he sang. “All the ladies turned me down and I felt like a clown / But would you look at me now? I’m puttin’ people in cages.”

Welles’ switching up from strummy folk ditties to heavy rock was a smart change of pace, but didn’t always play to his strengths.

Much of the music in that stretch of the show — which was opened by Brooklyn folk-rocker Hudson Freeman — was sludgy and lacked a distinctive identity, though Welles found his feet with “Red,” the title cut to his latest studio album.

But what came next was heartening. When Welles dismissed the band and was once again alone on stage, the solo songs he performed were introspective, nuanced and marked by impressive finger-picking guitar playing.

In that stretch, he covered an early Dylan song. But rather than a political broadside it was the beautiful if mean-spirited “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” which meshed nicely with his own “Friends” and “This Is Not My Song.”

When Welles called the musicians back for the fourth act of the episodic evening, they sounded like a different band. Instead of heavy metal thunder, they conveyed folk-rock subtlety, first with “Siddhartha,” and most effectively on “Horses.”

That song is about trying to get past enmity and hoping to avoid being swallowed up by anger. Welles and band put it over with a touch of grace.

“So I’m singing about loving and the people you’ve come to hate,” he sang. “It’s true what they say, I’m going to die someday / So why am I holding on to all the weight?”

As folk singers go, Welles is oddly tight-lipped between songs, with no chatty intros or origin stories adding context. He lets the music — and his abundant lyrics — speak for themselves.

And for all the seriousness of his subject matter, Welles can also be a goofball. (There’s a John Prine influence there.) Songs on on his TikTok include one about “Pizza” and another concerning “Beavers.” And he began his encore with the playful “Bugs.”

That song is slight, and self-consciously silly. But in declaring his fondness for insects of all kinds it nonetheless got at a humanist message that runs through all of Welles’ music. “I like bugs,” he sang, “They’re alive, and so am I.”