Song of the Day 9/30: Jesse Welles, “Tylenol”

Anyone who thinks the Trump Era calls for protest songs by folk singers should check out Jesse Welles. The 32-year-old Arkansas native has been releasing pointedly snarky tunes about timely for several months now. This one just dropped yesterday.

A lot of people compare Welles with Bob Dylan, but his career arc has been the opposite of Dylan’s. Welles started releasing music with a band on platforms like Bandcamp and SoundCloud in 2012, and came around to protest music more recently. Dylan started out by glomming onto folk music and protest songs, then ditched it for rock.

Welles, like the young Dylan, is an amazingly prolific writer – he’s credited with 20 albums either with his bands or solo, five so far this year alone, and most of the songs appear on Instagram and YouTube first. This one appeared shortly after the Musk acolyte known as “Big Balls” got himself mugged in Washington.