A Life Like Mine

Hey there Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew's got the needles spinning on a real deep cut from that Arkansas rocker Welles, the tune "A Life Like Mine" off the album Red Trees and White Trash. This one digs into the wild, rambling kind of living that comes with chasing the rock and roll dream through the hills and hollows. Welles, which is the moniker for Jesse Wells out of Ozark, Arkansas, poured a whole lot of his own story into these lines, and man, it shows in every warped guitar riff and that raspy voice asking just how far gone you have to be to roll through a life like that. The song came together right after he packed up and headed to Nashville, when all those little memories from home started slipping away like smoke from a campfire. He told folks he needed to put them down on tape somehow, and this was the first thing he laid down in his new room, with the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and Revolver spinning on the turntable for inspiration. You can hear that psychedelic swirl in the way the guitars twang like sitars and the vocals echo around like he's trying to hold onto the past before it fades.

The lyrics open with a sermon caught on the mount of Fairy Hill, up in Fayetteville, where he got into a scrap with a good buddy around two in the morning. They had just played a show, adrenaline still pumping, and the friend piled him into a Mercury or a Lincoln—he could never quite see which one in the haze. Sitting there on that big bench seat, he was heaving on a handful of bitter pills, trying to remember every word that got said that night. Welles has talked about how he was just incredibly angry back then, around nineteen or twenty, not willing to accept that life ain't fair and justice don't always show up when you need it. He even laughed about throwing a fit at the Walmart over a long line, that same fire still burning. It's all autobiographical, right down to the regret played on weak, cheap frets and hiding out with six micros up the nose so you hear echoes bouncing around Space Mountain. That Space Mountain was the communal art compound he shared with friends in Fayetteville, their own little Andy Warhol experiment where some worked on bicycles, others painted, and everybody tried to make something wild out of not much at all. The whole album walks you through that red-tree landscape and the white-trash roots he claims as his own, the kind of places folks drive through and mutter about before they keep going. If you're listening, you're stepping through his life back in Arkansas, all the wild shit and the hard lessons learned the really hard way.

He wrote a lot of these tunes while living in that compound, drawing from the glam rock of T. Rex's The Slider and Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, but also from the road-weary singers like early Dylan, Lennon, and Cobain. When he first heard Nirvana's Lithium back in middle school, that American voice barely getting through the words made him think, okay, I can do this. The music video for "A Life Like Mine" came out with giant papier-mâché hands and flowers everywhere, the band prancing through tunnels like they were on one long acid trip, and Welles described his sound as burnt toast even though that voice is pure unique, the kind that can whisper emotion or howl it out. The chorus keeps hammering that question about how messed up you got to be, and it fits right in with the rest of the record's look at repentance, remorse, and the gifted outsider feeling estranged from the regular world. He has said the album title came straight from walking through those red trees he grew up around and the white trash he belongs to, self-aware of how outsiders see those little towns. The whole thing is a journey, and this song is one of the stops where the memories get chronicled before they vanish.

Now, about how this cat got started in the first place. Jesse Wells was born and raised in Ozark, Arkansas, a place he figures was about thirty years behind the times even if the South was already lagging. His grandfather used to tape old LPs onto cassettes for him, starting with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band when he was in the first grade. That got him hooked on the Beatles, especially the three-guitar-solo stretch at the end of "The End," and he developed an early love for John Lennon's playing. Around age eleven he got his first guitar, a First Act model from the Walmart, and an older neighbor named Harlen Nichols started giving him informal lessons, teaching tunes like Camptown Races with homemade tablature on notecards and showing him how to tune up on a 1960s Gibson Hummingbird. He spent time at the public library in nearby Fayetteville digging into the Smithsonian Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music and Bob Dylan's debut, thinking for a while he might become a folk song collector for the state. In the eighth grade he played "The Times They Are A-Changin'" at the county fair and didn't even place, the only kid accompanying himself while the rest just karaoke'd it. After that folk phase he decided to put together a very loud rock and roll band, getting his buddies together to learn little things on the drum set and teach each other, using those as backing tracks. He released homemade recordings under names like Jeh Sea Wells, fronted bands called Dead Indian and Cosmic-American, and eventually landed on Welles once he moved to Nashville and signed with 300 Entertainment. The bulk of Red Trees and White Trash got written back in that Fayetteville compound before the Nashville stretch, and he has talked about having suitcases full of notebooks and hard drives packed with tunes written constantly since he was twelve. That early digging harder for music, renting the one Velvet Underground album from the library and taping it because nobody else in school had it, shaped the whole approach—appreciating what you dig up a lot more when you have to work for it. You can catch more of the story and the tunes over at his official site wellesmusic.com, or follow along on the Facebook page, the Instagram, and the X account. Fans have built a solid community too, with the active Jesse Welles Fan Club group on Facebook and the fan archive at Jesse Welles World. Spinning this one on THE ZOO brings all that Arkansas grit and the rock and roll spirit right into the room with us. Keep the freeform spirit alive, Zoo Freaks, and let the deep cuts keep rolling.