Jessica Lea Mayfield is out on her own, singing what she wants
by Jewly Hight
A teenager who wants to assert her individuality might resort to accumulating tattoos. Jessica Lea Mayfield had a more effective method: She got about as far from her musical roots as she could.
Mayfield—who's just short of 20—started singing with her family's bluegrass band, One Way Rider, at the tender age of 8, and her brother David is now a member of the progressive bluegrass group Cadillac Sky. (He plays bass for his sister whenever his schedule opens up.) But her solo debut, With Blasphemy So Heartfelt (released last September on Polymer Sounds), departs from bluegrass in significant ways.
Sure, Mayfield's songs—many of which she wrote during her mid-teens—are acoustic guitar-based. But they all unfold at a languid pace, never a hard-driving one, and her melodies are moody and minimalistic, not high and lonesome. Courtesy of Black Keys guitarist Dan Auerbach, who produced the set, they're framed in shaded, ambient textures instead of precise musicianship and blistering solos—and her lyrics pull no punches in expressing dark emotions. Or to put it another way: Mayfield is fond of singing choice words that would never show up in bluegrass lyrics.
"I took the aspects from bluegrass that I appreciated," she says. "I like the sad slow songs about people drowning and dying and people being heartbroken and cheating lovers and things like that. I knew that I was going in a different direction."
She adds, "I think it's important to be yourself as often as you can. It's healthy."
Mayfield still expresses an affinity for more traditional music, from bluegrass to gospel quartets. ("If three other people walked into this coffee shop and were like, 'Hey, sing this quartet with me,' I'd be like, 'Hell yeah.' " she says.) But in order to do her own thing, she needed the space to be sincere and irreverent, to sing "I could care less about you" to a mistreating boyfriend one minute and "Get thee behind me, Jesus" the next.
Experience has taught Mayfield that not all crowds are equally receptive to melancholic indie-country sung with a moony, reverb-drenched drawl: "I played shows with Cake and, um, that didn't go over too well. A lot of their fans were just looking at me like, 'You're really going to kill my buzz before the band starts?' "
On better-matched tours—with The Black Keys, The Avett Brothers or, currently, Annuals—younger (and perhaps more heartbreak-prone) audiences pay rapt attention. Sometimes they even sing along. "People come up to me and they talk to me about how my lyrics have touched them," says Mayfield. "They're getting more out of my songs than I do. When I get sad I listen to Elliot Smith or Coldplay or something. Just to be that for somebody else is freaking me out a little bit."
The Keys connection (she also sang on their album Attack and Release, and on Auerbach's album Keep It Hid) no doubt boosted Mayfield's reputation as an indie—not bluegrass—singer-songwriter. She's clearly appreciative, but—considering the wild array of made-up stories she's rattled off when interviewers have asked how she and Auerbach met (one of the more creative ones involved Auerbach's father throwing up on her on a rollercoaster)—she's not one to wax sentimental. "Well," she says, "I have to do it for my own sanity."
Email music@nashvillescene.com.
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