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Over the past year, folk singer Jesse Welles has become an unlikely star thanks to protest songs about everything from ICE raids and the health care industry to the opioid epidemic and the invasion of Ukraine. And less than 24 hours after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated<\/a> at Utah Valley University, Welles dropped a mournful ballad about the incident.<\/p>\n \u201cFor all of the bile\/The bold talk,\u201d he sings. \u201cThe venom\/The hate and the lies\/No one should be killed\/No blood should be spilled\/Charlie shouldn\u2019t have died\/Well you can\u2019t hate the gun and love the gun that shot yer rival\/You can\u2019t be kind and wish pain upon a child.\u201d<\/p>\n More from Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n The 31-year-old Kirk was shot dead on Wednesday while speaking to students at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, at an event on Turning Point USA\u2019s \u201cAmerican Comeback Tour.\u201d He was shot in the neck by an unknown assailant, who has not yet been caught.<\/p>\n The song comments on the sickening glee that\u2019s been spread in some corners in the aftermath of Kirk\u2019s death. \u201cI heard laughing,\u201d he sings. \u201cI heard glee\/But it coulda been you\/It coulda been me\u2026Spin the wheel, if you don\u2019t get killed\/You wind up dead inside.\u201d<\/p>\n Last month, Welles told Rolling Stone<\/a> that he began writing songs to try to understand the crazy world around him. \u201cWhat you\u2019re listening to is me making sense of the news,\u201d he said. \u201c\u2018What is this fentanyl crisis? Let me break it down in terms I can deal with and I\u2019ll make it rhyme.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019s performed recently with John Fogerty and was introduced by David Matthews at Farm Aid. \u201cI think he\u2019s one of the best songwriters I\u2019ve ever heard in my life,\u201d Matthews said. \u201cBut he gives me hope and he\u2019s unbelievable.\u201d<\/p>\n But Welles is very careful not to make explicitly partisan statements. When Rolling Stone asked how he voted in the last election, Welles paused for 20 seconds and ultimately declined to comment. \u201cI just\u2026I didn\u2019t know I\u2019d be talking about that kind of thing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Ultimately, he wants his music to be enjoyed by a vast audience, free of the partisan divide. \u201cI think a lot of us are politically homeless,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve been orphaned, and it\u2019s likely that we have been since before I was born. It seems very apparent now, in a way that maybe it didn\u2019t in the past, that nobody has your interests in mind. And now it feels like the first step in any kind of progress is unearthing the truth of the matter first, and we are arriving at that truth every day.\u201d<\/p>\n Best of Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for RollingStone’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the past year, folk singer Jesse Welles has become an unlikely star thanks to protest songs about everything from ICE raids and the health care industry to the opioid epidemic and the invasion of Ukraine. And less than 24 hours after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University, Welles dropped a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2015596,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[340116,369549,369550,368434,314737,368492],"class_list":["post-2015595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-charlie-kirk","tag-david-matthews","tag-health-care-industry","tag-jesse-welles","tag-rolling-stone","tag-utah-valley-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Protest-Singer-Jesse-Welles-Laments-the-Death-of-Charlie-Kirk.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2015595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2015595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2015595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2015596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2015595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2015595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2015595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}