If you need any further illustration of the creative explosion that Jesse Welles has been the catalyst and accelerant for over the last year or so, appreciate that he just released a 63-song album.
You don’t enjoy SXSW—the annual musical gathering in Austin, Texas every mid March. You endure it. You survive it. Here are Saving Country Music’s biggest takeaways from SXSW 2025.
Even before Jesse Welles wrote, recorded, and released this fully formed 10-song studio album amid sometimes daily song releases on social media, his musical output hovered somewhere near the impossible.
It’s one of the most frenetic and talent-rich events all year, resulting in one of the most sought-after tickets in music. It’s Willie Nelson’s Luck Reunion, and it happens on the Thursday of Austin’s greater SXSW gathering.
Absolutely LOADED update to the playlist as A-list singles and album cuts come flooding in on us, pushing well past the 25-song limit to include them all. This playlist is so good, moves are being made to make it illegal in Alabama.
Saving Country Music doesn’t always bestow a “Songwriter of the Year” award. In fact, no such award has ever been bestowed before. What do we owe such an occasion to, and who is the beneficiary?
Welcome to Saving Country Music’s most comprehensive guide to music in a given year, The Essential Albums List. It includes the “Most Essential” Albums, and then other albums reviewed and deemed worthy.
The Grammy Awards are supposed to be the one place where the critically-acclaimed, criminally-overlooked, and lifers of a respective genre get the recognition they deserve from a non-profit that puts the art first.
To make sure important names don’t go overlooked, here’s a sample of some of the other independent country performers who are guaranteed to deliver top-caliber performances patrons will remember.
Jesse Welles is the warrior poet who went from fronting rock bands to recently becoming the poet laureate of the apocalypse with his witty, poignant, and pointed observations presented in pure acoustic form.
Since the Grammy Awards are one of the few awards that weigh artistic merit over commercial success, it makes it a bit more important to pay attention to for fans and advocates of independent artists.
In one song after another, and in one verse after another, Jesse Welles stuns with his cutting criticism interwoven with sarcasm addressing today’s current events. Welles loads up and unleashes.
Jesse Welles might be a barely-known beat poet with a blonde Stella guitar singing his guts out with a broken voice out in the middle of the woods, and for all we know he may not be able to manage his sock drawer.
Jesse Welles has taken to social media, going where even many of the supposed bravest Americana songwriters are unwilling to go after weighing what sharing the honest truth might do to their careers.