Jesse Welles
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
I think most of my life, you know.
No, everyone worked and made art when they weren't working.
But no music really, but I liked music.
Like, my mom would always paint.
She put, like, murals on the walls of the house and stuff.
And my old man's a mechanic, and he would be tinkering around making all sorts of fun stuff, usually with his welder and whatnot.
So, I mean, I felt like they were artistic folks, you know, but they didn't necessarily do music.
You know, they're smarter than that.
I mean, it must mean something is up.
If people are celebrating somebody's death, something is wrong.
The system would have to be revolutionized.
I mean, you can't have health for profit at that point.
You'd have to socialize the medicine at some point.
You lose all the... No, all I mean is that you just don't want to have to go to an urgent care and it costs $500 to get a pack of antibiotics.
But that's a scam that so many folks are stuck in.
I suppose that's why folks were... You know, it was upsetting to see... You know, I felt like I actually had kind of an unpopular opinion about it, and that, you know, why are we celebrating somebody's death?
Like, that seems far out.
To celebrate the murder of somebody with a gun?
I mean, how far out is that?
And so I didn't want, you know, I make these tunes, but that one in particular I was like, how do I even, how do I address this?
Step one is avoid the work.
So I went for some long jogs.
amazon instead and put up like amazon is santa claus and i kept sitting there and it kept getting you know the situation was snowballing with the united healthcare thing and i was like okay you got it right and at that point it's
It's a research project.
You know, let's write 2,000 words so that we can have 300 to sing and boil down the essence of the issue and make it rhyme and put a jolly tune behind it.
That's really... That's kind of how that goes about.
and you don't it's just punchlines so find the punchline of everything find the punchline of everything I never had the attention span to tell too much of a story or anything like that so I like I like just keeping it in punchlines so I always like you know Mitch Hedberg and Stephen Wright um
Just come out and lay out a bunch of punchlines immediately.
If one doesn't land, on to the next one.
He's one of the coolest.
I, you know, there's a lot, there's a lot of folks doing it right now and, and more every day, but there was, I mean, there's a precedent for that kind of work.
Um, especially as far as like Woody, Woody Guthrie was really the, I was reading, I was
And my old man was in the hospital.
He had just had a heart attack, and we didn't know what way it was going to go or whatever.
Anyway, I don't know, just seeing him all hooked up to that stuff and thinking, if he died...
I've hardly had any time to even know him.
He's hardly had any time to know anything.
We don't get very long down here, and I'm reading this Woody Guthrie biography, and I was just like, oh, I'm going to do this.
I'm going to sing the news.
Because that's really what Woody was kind of doing in his day.
Because there's folk music around him, and he'd team up with Pete Seeger, and he was on radio programs, and he could have played.
He could have played standards.
He could have played country western music and stuff like that.
But he liked making folks laugh, and he liked telling it how it was.
I like both those things.
He got Huntington's disease and was laid up in a home for quite a while.
He lost the ability to speak and everything.
A rare genetic disorder.
I don't really know what it does other than, yeah, look, he was pretty young.
You know what I'm saying?
He was sitting next to, he was in East Palestine.
Maybe he was riding on trains and boxcars and stuff.
There's no telling what they were hauling around and that sort of thing.
But he played the political tunes.
He – I don't – and maybe he's a continuation of –
of a longstanding human tradition of like bards going from town to town and singing the news.
Maybe there was some medieval dude going around singing about the King, you know, and I don't remember, maybe, maybe, maybe there was just cause I don't, I like, I don't know if it's a uniquely American tradition, but,
when I do it, I like to, I get romantic about it and kind of think of it as a uniquely American tradition because you got the freedom to do it and no one's gunning me down in the, in the field there or anything for anything I say, you know, so I get to,
Or maybe you hired, you co-opted the bard, you turned him into your fool, your jester or whatever, and then he sang songs for you about how fat the neighbor king was.
Who was in Lord of the Rings?
Who was like Theoden's dude?
Was he in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?
Is that like Billy Babbitt?
At least whatever's going on in one floor of the cookie's nest is essentially a prison.
Well, they're all with electroshock therapy.
Meanwhile, Kennedy's got his.
He's running his escapades.
Seems like an incredibly lucrative business to get into during Prohibition.
I don't know who wouldn't be running liquor.
Yeah, I guess that's the roots of.
So if it's running from the cops, if it weren't for Joe, we wouldn't have had wouldn't have Dale.
So what's the modern lobotomy?
What are we doing right now that we're going to read on Wiki or whatever?
There's probably quite a few of them.
There's probably quite a few of them.
I don't know, like prescribing benzos and stuff.
Benzos is the craziest one.
Well, it's just the different...
the stress you would undergo getting out of the addiction you might never you might never come come back fully or get your life all the way back after an addiction like that well i know several people that have had that problem and it is a real struggle right like jordan peterson has publicly talked about it it took him over a year to recover physically just from being addicted
And that's actually going to rehabs and stuff like that.
Most folks, they ain't going nowhere.
They don't have the money.
They get off it and then drink themselves to death.
Or do cocaine or do something else.
You can get off one and hop over to the other.
It's like an authority figure told them it's all good to take this pill, you know, or whatever.
I mean, could a patient kind of figure that out pretty quick?
Well, they don't because they keep taking it, right?
You keep taking it because you're addicted to it.
If you forget a dose, you start feeling those withdrawals come in, you know, or...
That's what I'm saying.
When you get off of anything, all sorts of stuff rattles loose in your head, man.
And everything gets worse for a period of time.
How long does... You get a benzo belly.
Folks are making money.
As long as they keep the money rolling in.
outside of escaping briefly and getting a look at it from, you know, some... So is Ibogaine like smooth out all the ruts?
Does Ayahuasca do something similar?
They will fucking— Well, yeah.
Religions, they get weirder and weirder.
In America, they get weirder and weirder the more west we went, the more we manifest destiny out.
You have Puritan pilgrims land in New England.
And the weirdest of them move a little bit more west, or the Quakers just go to Nantucket.
They'll be on an island and be isolated.
But eventually, in about 100 years, you've got Mormons.
And then give it another 100-something years, then you've got Scientology out in California.
Nothing was in the West, man.
It was death incarnate.
I imagine it like Blood Meridian, like McCarthy's book, where basically, you know, it follows a story like this kid who goes on a scalping mission.
you know where their their job is to go down into guadalajara and then come up in through the states and they just they scalp pretty much everyone they meet indiscriminately and then take those scalps back for dough it's you know for a bounty which is crazy how much is the scalps worth i don't i don't know imagine that you just find some dude who's like fucking taking care of a lawn or something like that i take that over a lobotomy my scalp is
Some people that lived.
Yeah, I've seen that picture.
I guess you play dead while it's going down.
And, oh, they would, like in McCarthy's book at least, which it follows the Glanton gang, I'm pretty sure at times they kill some of their own gang.
Just because they were dark-haired.
And you're going to have the wildest of the wild are going to go out there and tame that land, man.
And that's essentially... Calls them out.
Were they doing that into the 1890s?
Imagine someone kept that.
When does the karma come in on this bloodshed that founded?
Well, I'm certain it did for the individuals involved.
I wonder if it's generational, if the universe will continue to sort itself out over this time.
I wonder if things are, you know, probably seem a lot cleaner as far as chaos and bloodshed now in the continent.
u.s and the union and stuff but who is sending folks to go do that abroad to protect the homeland you know under the under the auspices of
Protecting the homeland.
Because I really think we stay as much as has changed, and we can measure that.
I think also we stay the same.
Well, until we're forced to change.
I think of like, do you ever see, this is Hollywood, but Apocalypse Now?
It was Francis Ford Coppola and he's got like Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper and Robert Duvall and all those cool cats and dope movie.
But it's written on this
premise of a book that was written in like 1899 by Joseph Conrad like Heart of Darkness oh wow it's that old and Heart of Darkness was talking about a conquest of I believe the Dutch I'm not sure into the Congo and
and some atrocities and stuff that were happening there, treating people as subhuman.
I don't know if there was scalping or anything, but I think that there was slavery and that sort of thing.
But Coppola was able to adapt that
and then put the vietnam war as the new premise going into i think they i think sheen's mission and in the in the movie at least was to go go up river into cambodia or laos i'm not sure which and take out a rogue u.s general who had basically enslaved a population of uh
All that to say, I wonder if in Vietnam, if the folks fighting out there felt like in that moment, in that moment where you're killing somebody, if you realize at that point that nothing has ever changed and that this is
There's something primeval in man with this violence, that this violence is innate.
Or is this violence innate?
Is this how folks are and there's no helping it and there's nothing that's ever going to change it?
Because you can get kind of cynical that way.
And I kind of tend on this more idealistic and at times it seems naive or stupid to have an ideal that folks could live in harmony and peace without taking one another's lives.
The problem is they've never done it before.
Because it is in all...
I think it's in a lot of us, deep down.
It sounds like a show of force.
This is what these games...
Is it, yeah, I just, I wonder, is it within humans?
To exist in peace without.
Well, we certainly can.
It's just like, I think it,
you know the folks that that go to war like if you if you signed up and went to and went to iraq and you know and like oh oh three oh six or seven you know and you're securing or not maybe not iraq but you're going to afghanistan and you're securing opium fields and stuff and
You're risking your life.
You are prepared to take somebody's life.
It seems like for the sake of just for the sake of the hunt or something like that.
So then it takes a larger – it takes essentially a PSYOP in order to get men to fight for the interests of the people who are performing the PSYOP.
What's more noble than letting somebody live?
Was Smedley the one where there was a coup and they had asked him to.
They asked him to take.
There was a documentary I used to watch by Francis O'Connell.
I think it's his name, but it's called Everything's a Rich Man's Trick.
And he would always talk about Smedley D. Butler.
I mean, this is before even World War II.
Is that the premise of Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick?
I should read more, Joe.
He had a whole bunch of nicknames.
Did you see that whole list of nicknames?
The Wall Street Putsch.
But there's Congress folks that do it all the time.
They made an example out of Martha Stewart, I suppose.
What a great job to have.
I should have gone into.
These people are clinging with their dying breath to every ounce of power.
I care about the American people.
Are there bot wars now?
Are they actual bots or are they like people in a call center?
It seems to be like manufactured chaos in order to take the air out of the room, to suffocate information.
Hate speech shouldn't be legal.
That's kind of the idea behind the false flag.
Well, that's what got us into Vietnam.
Like the Mandalay Bay thing.
There's a lot of theories behind that one.
That one's going to bother me forever because that one actually happened while I was awake and paying attention and it just...
That dude wasn't doing all of it.
That's what I'm saying.
I mean, didn't the security guard witness go on Ellen to explain it?
I thought it was like metal detectors in the casinos.
Because there were people in the state government that had stock in these security systems.
God, I hope that's not true.
What's the other theories?
That one gets real weird.
We got Ruby Ridge, Waco, Tim doing his thing, possibly with the team.
Okay, see, was that to destroy information?
Is that the conspiracy theory?
That like in the Oklahoma City bombing, there was a bunch of info in the building that they wanted to... Perhaps.
Because I know some of Bill Clinton's stuff maybe disappeared.
Was the ATF in that building?
Then maybe they would have had... Some information?
Some explosives could have been in their possession even or something.
Well, they're studying.
I would have been totally shook.
That's a huge demo job, man.
It was revenge for the government's intervention with Ruby Ridge and the Waco.
So he was going to take on that.
Well, didn't they find the folks who were going to kidnap the governor or something?
It was just like, wasn't it all the gov?
You make the problem, fix the problem.
It's kind of like the pharmaceutical industry or something.
They go into the private sector.
Over with Blackwater or something.
Like what are we trying to do?
I just wonder how much within those – within even these buildings, like what's the communication like in a huge organization like the FBI or something?
Are there people over on floor two that have no idea what's going on on floor four?
Just pockets, pockets of intelligence, little microcosms of –
Of people working, you know?
It's like as above, so below.
Man, the patterns go down forever.
Your comedy's like that.
You don't think it feels great to kick ass at something?
Well, I mean, it certainly does to be successful.
The pursuit of excellence is like the most joy-rendering thing that there is.
Well, you don't have to have, like I don't, this is the thing, it's like playing guitar or something, I don't have an enemy.
You're not a corporation, right?
I don't have a record deal, if that's what you're saying.
What is it going to do?
that'd be kind of cool you'll probably have to do that someday eventually I'll be in a corporation maybe after this podcast you'll have to do that call it bottomless wells that's the most fun and it does seem like it is what anytime you're in a hard place or anything like that mentally or
Yeah, like, the best way out is, like, find something to try to get good at or try some, you know, and then try your best at it.
And it just seems innate.
But do they even care about their bank account?
Like, what is it to them?
It's something totally different.
Well, he's involved in a lot of the... Do you give a big loan or give a big favor out and then just take whatever you want from them?
Because everyone's got notes once they...
Dude, philanthropy is far out.
I have a song about philanthropy.
It's called Philanthropist.
That's the only way to properly do it, right?
It shouldn't be allowed.
It shouldn't be allowed.
Well, it shouldn't be that easy to trick people.
I'm like, who in the hell would think that this is... Good things happen because of it, but more bad things happen than good a lot of the time.
And you're holding an entire nation hostage or an entire group of people hostage by lending them money.
I mean, that guy was all over the flight logs and everything.
All tangled up in all sorts of stuff, man.
Was he the fixer in that regard?
They're trying very hard to get away with this one.
I don't know if the people are going to.
People are never going to forget.
I heard it's a democratic hoax.
Is she looking at a pardon?
Let that motherfucker live.
This is mutually assured destruction.
Some kind of nuclear standoff.
It's not like a Tom Wolfe or something or another.
Well, I mean, isn't Bob Woodward, he's known to have been hired or at least worked with CIA and stuff.
He was an intelligence agent.
Yeah, he's an intelligence agent.
And he builds the narratives.
I didn't see that aspect of it in all the president's men.
Who was that, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford?
Yeah, you don't get that.
Because that was before the internet.
I kind of wonder if they... Listen, I'm sure... Actually, I don't know anything about... Do you know Tom Hanks?
I just wonder if every once in a while when the government needs to explain something to the public in a way that puts us in the best light, if they commission a movie through Hollywood and stick Tom Hanks in it, man.
He's just explained so much to us over the years.
With Charlie Wilson's war, it's like, here's how this goes.
You know, Forrest Gump is kind of a nostalgia fest about the Vietnam War.
It kind of makes light of it.
I read this and this and that right, but there were small groups of people most people were in the dark Even if you had a counter-narrative you'd be like Pete Seeger and get like blacklisted in the 50 You know musician you be Smedley Butler, but what you're right who was in a The end of his career yeah
It's a wonder he survived his own tell-all there with War is a Racket.
It didn't seem to do a whole lot, whatever.
World War II is just six years after.
America was really not wanting to get in with World War I anyway.
Some folks think that even might have been a false sinkage.
Do they think that was a false one?
So we had already been in Vietnam for years at that point.
I mean, is this what the Bay of Pigs is?
Yeah, if that was something that you'd go and mine people out of that operation.
Something's not good when we're celebrating just death.
So there's still—sorry, you've got to kind of fill me in.
So what are the two sides doing to bring him down?
To revoke his citizenship?
He is a citizen, of course.
That's what the folks want.
What, the politicians really controlled by like three main things, like special interests, donor class, and multinational corporations.
So anybody who looks like they're disentangled from any of those things is looking pretty appealing.
I think polls are just made so that news people have something to talk about.
Well... I wouldn't be surprised if they're the ones... Well, they probably are.
They probably go to the poll center and they say, run this poll because I got to have something to talk about on Wednesday.
Because if you call me... I never met anybody who's answered a poll.
You met a lot of folks.
You ever met anyone who answered a poll?
I think the news is an incredibly lucrative business.
It's an entertainment business.
There's not news every day.
And they got to run 24 hours.
They're making up news.
They should call it the old because it's always the same shit happening, man.
Like it's not even... Yeah.
It doesn't matter where you're getting it either.
that and like the i feel like the most like colorful people that they would have had on their things have gone indie now you know like like tucker carlson has his his podcast and like um let's see candace owens was with like daily wire and now she's like got she's got her own yeah big thing and there's and then there's smaller there's smaller ones you got like
Breaking breaking points is one.
I mean, we have to be talented to do that, to sit there and look at a camera and just talk for like hours about you got to be really talented.
So then there's not much career for you after that.
Those folks, all these folks who do, I think even Bill, Bill O'Reilly, after he got like kicked out, you know, from, from broadcast, he has, he's got his podcasts and stuff.
If they, they really believe their, their stuff, man.
Whether they're right or wrong.
Yeah, well, it's not about that.
I feel like the public has to understand that at the end of the day, these guys are...
Whether they believe it or not, this is entertainment.
These guys are entertainers.
They're telling you stuff.
They're feeding it to you.
And you've got to take things with a big-ass grain of salt because this stuff is – these are entertainers.
That's the cheapest thing they can pull over on the news stations is to have sex appeal.
I think we're going to wake up.
We're going to say, I don't care what the hot lady on Fox says.
They're murdering people.
When you shared the list, that one blew up too.
Yeah, that was a good one too.
There's no shortage of stuff to make tunes on.
Yeah, when something is like, gee, I got something I could say about that, then that's when you do a tube.
Folks got too much time on their hands.
Yeah, it's... Read the Dr. Bronner's bottle.
Everybody can get on now, too.
I mean, it's just like I prop up my iPhone and play a tune.
Everyone can just get the phone in front of their face and get it out there, you know?
There's no rules as far as, especially in the music industry and stuff.
There's no rules anymore.
Anyone who tells you that they know what to do or that they know what they're doing, they're so full of shit, dog.
Nobody knows what they're doing.
And like we want we want people to know because we want to ask, like, what could I do to, you know, to have to be successful or whatever?
And there's no gatekeepers or anything like that.
All you have to do is want to play music.
And then go and do it on your phone and see if anyone likes you.
And if they like you, that's good.
Then everybody will come to you and say, I know how to make this bigger.
And they don't know what they're talking about either.
No, generally they're vampires.
Oh, they come out of the woodwork, dog.
But they'll offer you a little for a lot, you know?
They'll go, you know, here's...
I mean, there are all sorts of folks in the early days coming through labels and stuff going, here's, we'll give you 10 grand for like 30 songs or something like that.
And it's like, this is insulting.
I don't want any of this.
promises they will oh that's money they give you so much up front and you don't even like if you don't know it's just a big ass loan that you're never gonna recoup and then you're you're not even you're not living off your own dough at that point you're just living off of borrowed money like everybody else in the states and you're attached to them forever yeah you're attached to them forever they just they own your masters you'll never see it back I mean I was signed to a label when I was like 22 I've been through that all that crap how old are you now I'm 47
No, I'm going to be 33 this year.
yeah well you don't you don't have to have all those people put they're not going to help you no they don't too many cooks in the kitchen way too many people wanting to sign people eating at the dinner plate and dude whenever anybody gives you like if label comes in let's say chris took let's say he took the deal you know or whatever if oliver anthony took the big deal
Then he's got all these people up there in the office with tax write-off MacBooks telling him what to do with his music because they opened their wallet and they're going to have to give you notes.
They're entitled to give you their opinion at that point and he wouldn't be able to just do whatever the hell he wants to do.
And I think it's so important for artists to be able to do whatever the hell they want to do because that's the only way they can be themselves.
And then that's the only way you can be successful is to completely be yourself at all times, 100%.
And dough will change your life in a way that you might not be ready for or something.
You're going to think, I got this dough.
Now I can leave this town I don't like.
Or I can get the house that I was wanting.
Really, it was being...
in that town and kind of having things difficult pressures around you and stuff that was creating these diamonds that was putting you in this situation to make good art and stuff like that yeah and you take away all your discomfort and then realize you can't make art and you're not happy
And then you start getting nostalgic about the good old days when you were broke and shit like that.
It's better to just take only what you need.
Your measure of success is like how much can I be myself and be happy that way.
If you can still be 100% yourself all the way to the end of the line, then that's your success.
But that's a smart way of looking at things.
But we know that, like, we know even from talking about, like, people whose business, whose art is money, it creates misery to be chasing the bank account, to constantly have the dough, you know?
Like, you create a wake of, you create bad art, all right?
Your albums start to suck.
You might be getting in bigger, bigger places and stuff like that.
But, yeah, it's going to fall off, and when it does, you know,
Then you have some existential problems to deal with at that point.
Van Halen definitely sold his soul to the devil.
But it doesn't make any sense as far as like Robert Johnson.
He sold his soul, I guess, so he could play and then not be successful in his lifetime and die poor.
And then we would all find him later.
He's working in the future.
In every generation, there's a player, man.
I mean, maybe you could trace the line.
Johnson, Hendrix, that's skipping a few, but to Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, and then you've got like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani and like these virtuosos.
Stevie Ray Vaughan, so important to Texas too, Stevie.
I don't know if you've seen him at Austin City Limits slinging his guitar behind his back.
He's got all his scarves and stuff.
Isn't that interesting?
Salt of the Earth, dude.
That is one of those talents every generation has.
I mean, safer than the helicopter pilots and stuff.
It's fun to think back on that.
When I was 18, I did a radio program for KDYN, Real Country Radio, every Saturday morning.
It was called Dial-A-Deal, where people call in.
It was basically like an on-air Craigslist.
But I was alone at the station after football games.
Football games would be like Friday night.
go to bed all beat up, wake up at like 5 a.m., go into the station, record the obituaries real quick because those are going to run on Saturday, and then do like an on-air Craigslist radio program and you're just like 17 years old with the entire radio station to yourself.
I was a total dumbass too.
I could have been like, anyway, here's Grand Funk Railroad.
uh the list was like programmed in and then you had to record weather so you would pull up the national weather service on the on the screen and then you would record yourself doing the weather saying you know winds are going to be southeast south southeast northwest out of 15 miles an hour or whatever you do the obituaries
But, no, you didn't actually DJ.
It was just like you would hit the space bar, music would start playing, and be like, okay, folks, if you can't tell by the music, I'll go ahead and tell you myself it's time for Dial-A-Deal.
Remember, our numbers up here are 667-4567 or toll-free at 888-325-KDYN.
Remember, no commercial real estate advertisement.
Please limit your calls to once per program.
And keep in mind, I can't always keep track of these numbers up here myself.
So if you remember them on your end, you're doing me and you a favor.
Let's get back to the dialing and a dealing.
And then people would call in and they'd be like, I'm looking for my dog.
And I'd be like, somebody find that dog.
And then, you know, list off their number.
No, it was a classic country radio station, so I'm up there listening to, like, Willie, Waylon, Hank Sr., Hank Jr.
And then, also, they were playing, they were playing, like, some modern, like, I remember Brad Paisley was being played on there, and he just shredded, but...
no i couldn't i couldn't i was in a grunge band at the time i couldn't play wait really yeah i think that yeah the i couldn't put once i printed out the track listing uh for the record that i had made i would i would make cd records and sell them at school like five bucks a pop i made more money selling records in high school than i ever did as an adult but you'd i'd
printed out all the song lists anyway the album was called mom i'm gay and all the uh i left a bunch of them like at the radio station i remember the guy who was running it he came to me and he was like did you print these out are these yours and it was just kind of awkward after that but a small town in arkansas kind of far out that's funny but i you know
Folks will let a young person do all kinds of stuff.
I guess they see an aptitude in you.
They trust you, so they let you drive a limo.
There's high turnover at the radio station because we weren't making any dough.
They had a program called... I forget what it was, but on...
Every morning they would go through the sponsors of the radio station, which were all local businesses, and they would say, here's a cup of coffee for Burns Drug.
And it was just like a call out to Burns Drug, Burns Pharmacy or whatever.
And then you'd hear the sound of a coffee cup.
You'd be like, oh, Janine died.
We got to go to the memorial.
They would tell what the hillbillies, like the mascot was the hillbillies and like how high school football was doing and stuff like that.
Like here's the news, you know.
I might have to start one.
I'm not who... You gonna do a different voice?
I know you, but you don't know me.
No, I just scheduled tours, so, like, tomorrow I'll announce a tour, and I think it's, like, 20-something dates, and then I'll go out for...
two months and and play you know you just play solo do you bring no i bring a band oh that's a whole band um and then right now i've just been in festival season so i just played the newport folk fest shout out newport do you do any of these songs like united health oh yeah you do all of them yeah nice i got because i i'm just always putting out albums like yeah like on friday i'll put out another record too
You know, I wrote like 100 songs in 24 and just like put them all out.
And that's what's great about being indie is like you can just put out music as soon as you make it.
But there's a lot of tunes to choose from, right?
Usually on the set I'll play a lot of these topical ones and then bring the band up and then we'll play the other records that I got.
But no, I was just at Newport and then we did Edmonton Folk Fest and here in a little bit I'll do Farm Aid and Healing Appalachia.
Like last year around this time, John Cougar Mellencamp sent me an email and was like, Jesse, I would like you to play at Farm Aid.
But it was from a weird email address and I didn't believe it was him.
But it was totally him just like emailing through his girlfriend's email or something.
And so I showed it to one of the...
like one of my friends he has managed and he's like I'll vet this out we'll see if this is legit and sure enough it was anyway go down to Farm Aid and that's like one of the first gigs that I play as this iteration of myself um
But I got to meet a lot of cool people and get to be friends with a lot of them, too.
Lucas Nelson, it was very cool to meet him last year, and now I think we'll be doing a tune together here before too long.
Him, I got to meet Charlie over there at Farm Aid.
Charlie... Charlie Crockett.
That's maybe the only thing that AI is not going to overcome.
I don't understand why musicians are... You know, they're making...
Listen, artists, everything that can be replaced will be replaced, okay?
And pop music was already AI.
Patrick has a great point there.
I don't think artists, what you're making, I don't think you got nothing to worry about.
They'll have to find something else to do.
They'll have to listen to something else in JCPenney.
I'll just say, the music like that always, yeah, I feel like I'm in a, yeah, I feel like I'm in an academy or.
They just need something to go in the background, some non-confrontational music.
It's how it has always been as long as man has been around.
Everything that can be replaced will be replaced, but there are things that are irreplaceable.
I mean, didn't Hetfield and, I mean, Metallica was eventually kind of right about what they said about Napster, right?
I think the record companies have figured out how to make money off of streaming and to make sure that the artist probably doesn't get all that much of it.
You make enough to pay for another tour.
They gotta find a way to pull it in somehow if they're not selling the records.
They get a piece of everything.
Just standing in the way every time you try to put out an album, they go, I don't hear a hit here.
It's like, well, because there are none, okay?
Wait for the next record.
It's out in two months, you know?
But they want to make as much as they possibly can off of one record, and the one record, it puts an immense amount of pressure on an artist without...
Without developing the artist at all It's What's Hunter?
Nobody's telling you to be careful.
Have you heard Freebird?
If you don't think music's a drug, listen to Freebird.
Running with the devil.
They're little mood capsules, man.
I want to feel melancholy.
Here's Yesterday by the Beatles.
Oh, I was thinking a Captain Fantastic with Elton John.
He's one of the greats, man.
Thanks for having me, Joe.
I'm online, so get online.