Jesse Welles and Ratboys played at Red Butte Garden and Arboretum on August 14, 2026, one of the most highly-anticipated concerts in the university’s entire season.
It takes seeing a concert put on by a couple of out-of-towners — a twangy protest singer from Arkansas and an outspoken Chicago rock band — to realize political views have shifted wildly in the past couple of years alone. So has Welles’ musical direction. While he’s played guitar and crafted songs ever since he was a boy, he started penning protest and folk music as recently as 2024. He’s what some call a singer made for these times, able to both sing about a failing government and throw in occasional covers by Nirvana, Black Sabbath, and The Beatles.
I chatted briefly with KRCL deejay Ebay Jamil Hamilton while at the show when we stumbled on a truth together: Welles has an uncommon ability to quickly craft songs pulled from the latest headlines. The algorithm serves him well. When ICE was making headlines for their brutality and failure to follow the law, Welles made a tongue-in-cheek song about it (“Join Ice”). He offered a string of other tunes that also take their cues from the news machine, and their titles reveal all. A long sprawling 30+ song set of both acoustic and full band numbers gave us songs like “Walmart,” “Fentanyl,” and “Masks Off.”
Ratboys were here earlier in the year at Urban Lounge — and we chatted with frontwoman Julia Steiner then — but having the chance to see them on an open-air stage felt like an upgrade. The band’s songs deal far less with today’s political climate than Welles’ songs do, but sharing their candid thoughts on the presidency earned them some of the loudest cheers heard all night. While their pairing may not have made total sense until the night of the show, whoever put them on the same bill deserves more than a few gold stars. Bra-vo!
Photo by Natalie Simpson. IG: @beehivephotovideo
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