A Life Like Mine (in Studio 2018)

Alright Zoo Freaks, the needle is down on "A Life Like Mine (in Studio 2018)" by Jesse Welles from the single, and this one rolls out with that raw autobiographical weight that hits like a late-night road story told over a crackling radio. The lyrics open with a line about catching a sermon on the mount of Fairy Hill in a Mercury or a Lincoln that he can't quite see, and it pulls you straight into the scene of an Ozark kid wrestling with the unfairness of things. In a 2018 interview with Pancakes & Whiskey, Welles explained that the song started life at a much slower tempo, about twenty clicks down, so the words could unfold smooth and easygoing. During that same phone conversation from Nashville to New York, he spontaneously sang those opening lines at half speed over the fuzzy connection, turning the whole interview into an impromptu little concert. Fairy Hill is a real spot in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Welles got into a fight with a very good friend of his there after a show, adrenaline still high from the gig, and the buddy piled him into that big car with the bench seat. "I caught a sermon" is him trying to hold onto everything the friend was laying down that night. The handful of bitter pills is pure truth from when he was nineteen or twenty, incredibly angry and refusing to accept that life is not always fair. He still does not, and he even laughed about throwing a huge fit at Walmart because the line was taking too long. When justice is not happening, it has torn him down since he was a little kid, and he learned some of those lessons the hard way.

Most of his early music is straight-up his experiences, he said after a thoughtful pause. Codeine is autobiographical, Life Like Mine is autobiographical, and the same goes for tracks like Are You Feeling Like Me and Hold Me Like I'm Leaving. He wrote this one soon after he moved to Nashville from his hometown of Ozark, Arkansas, feeling all those little memories from home starting to slip. He needed to chronicle them somehow, and it was the first thing he recorded in his new room while he had been listening to a lot of Magical Mystery Tour and Revolver. The recording process for the full album Red Trees and White Trashes was a whirlwind. He had not met the studio musicians before the session, but producer Dave Cobb assembled a team of top-tier players and told him these guys are gonna be the best of the best, so don't you worry. That let him focus on delivering the raw emotion. The song came out as a promotional single in March 2017 for the upcoming Codeine EP and the album that dropped in 2018 under the mononym Welles on 300 Entertainment. The official video, directed by Mafalda Millies, fills the frame with giant paper mache hands, an entire garden of flowers, and the band prancing through tunnels in New York City, oblivious to their own peculiarities. It reads like a four-minute acid trip, all psychedelic visuals that match the ethereal, dream-like tale of regret and remorse in the verses and that chorus asking how fucked up have you got to be to live a life like mine. Welles once described his own sound as burnt toast, but that raspy growl and the fuzzy guitars that twang like sitars give the track its unmistakable edge.

Jesse Allen Breckenridge Wells was born in 1992 in Ozark, Arkansas, a small town of a few thousand people with a turkey plant, an engine plant, a gas station or two, and a handful of restaurants. The radio station there spun classic rock, Motown, and old country songs, and if the South was ten or fifteen years behind the times, Ozark was about thirty. He began playing guitar around age eleven after getting a cheap First Act from Walmart. The guitar-heavy sound of Beatles albums like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road hooked him hard, especially the three-guitar-solo section of The End. At first he thought you changed the melody by cranking the tuning pegs and broke a bunch of strings figuring it out. Then he watched his old man press the low E string against the fretboard and realized that was how it worked. An older neighbor named Harlen Nichols started giving him informal lessons, teaching songs like Camptown Races with homemade tablature drawn on notecards, showing him how to tune the instrument, and introducing him to older styles while playing a 1960s Gibson Hummingbird. As a teenager he borrowed a drum kit from the school band director on holiday breaks, set up a home studio in his mother's garage, recorded his own songs, and burned them onto CDs that he sold at school. Influences ran from folk, country, classic rock, and Motown to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Nirvana. A classmate on the school bus introduced him to Nirvana and he had an epiphany: he could not do Robert Plant, but maybe he could do something like Cobain. He also draws from American wordsmiths like Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Cormac McCarthy, and Mark Twain.

Around 2012 he started releasing homemade recordings under names like Jeh Sea Wells, posting them on SoundCloud and Bandcamp. He formed the hard rock grunge-inspired band Dead Indian with Dirk Porter and Simon Martin, then later Cosmic American after that project wound down. In 2015 he moved to Nashville to work with producer Dave Cobb, and the collaboration led to the debut album Red Trees and White Trashes under the mononym Welles in 2018. The band toured nationally, opened for acts including Royal Blood and Highly Suspect, and played festivals. The sound blended psychedelic grunge with introspective lyricism and that distinct raspy voice. After years of hard touring and the hamster wheel of chasing a big break, he stepped back, returned to Arkansas, and eventually shifted into the acoustic folk protest songs that have connected with so many listeners in recent years. This track from the studio in 2018 captures the earlier rocker phase pure and unfiltered, full of those memories from home and the friction of growing up where life is not fair.

You can follow the full journey over at his official site wellesmusic.com, check the updates on Facebook, see the photos and posts on Instagram, and catch the word on X. Fans keep a deep archive of the songs, shows, and story going at Jesse Welles World, and there is a big active group on Facebook called the Jesse Welles Fan Club where the Welleswolves gather to share the music. This is the kind of deep cut that belongs right here with the freeform album rock we keep spinning at THE ZOO. The stories run as deep as the grooves, and the raw honesty in a track like this one is what keeps the dial locked in for the Zoo Freaks.