This month will mark eight years since the release of Jessica Lea Mayfield’s Make My Head Sing. I just heard the album for the first time recently, and to my ears, its heady, sugary, grunge-gaze amalgam sounds thrilling, fresh and profound. Its emotional range is arresting, serving honeyed, starry-eyed harmonies one moment (“Standing in the Sun”) and supercharged melodious punk stylings the next (“Do I Have the Time”), before studying the bleakness of addiction over a perfect slowcore dirge (“Party Drugs”).
When she was making that record, Mayfield was based in East Nashville and listening to a lot of Queens of the Stone Age, Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots. But that place and those bands are far from the only influence on her work. Mayfield is a Buckeye State native who spent her early years with her bluegrass-leaning family band, bouncing back and forth between Northeast Ohio and Middle Tennessee with stints in Kentucky and West Virginia in between. Tennessee was the setting for some noteworthy experiences.
“I played the opening of Opry Mills mall when I was 9,” Mayfield recalls with a laugh. She’s speaking with the Scene ahead of a full-band show on April 22 at The High Watt, her first headlining appearance here in several years.
As a teenager, Mayfield made her first solo recording, an EP called White Lies, with help from her brother David. Almost a decade after that mall gig, she earned national recognition for her first full-length, the uncannily deep 2008 alt-country collection With Blasphemy So Heartfelt. Produced by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, the album established her as an exciting new addition to the long lineage of Ohioans making timeless American music. (Asked if there’s something in the water there, she answers succinctly: “Boredom.”) Auerbach also worked the boards for Mayfield’s next one, 2011’s Tell Me, before the duo mutually ended their creative partnership.
“We were sort of like fire and ice personality-wise,” Mayfield says of Auerbach. “It was odd, but it’s probably what made those albums interesting.”
The aforementioned Make My Head Sing came next. In 2017, she followed it with Sorry Is Gone, a no-holds-barred musical exposé of an abusive relationship that’s thankfully now in the rearview.
“Sorry Is Gone documented the moment I first woke up to what was happening to me, and the past few years have been more of a healing process than anything,” she says. “I realized I spent my whole life letting other people push me around and tell me what to do. That chapter is definitely over.”
Still only 32, Mayfield is deep into her career. And for the first time, she’s taking her time. Now based in Los Angeles, she spent her quarantine time practicing drums, watching Degrassi, playing Animal Crossing — and writing an album’s worth of new songs.
Her plan is to parcel out her next full-length as a series of singles, and so far there have been two. “Daddy Boyfriend” backed with “Emotional Abandonment” came out in 2020, while “Can You Feel It?” backed with “72 Past Lives” was released last year. Each is available as a digital single and in a very limited run of 7-inches. While her touring band consists of guitarist Blake Wooten, bassist Angela Wooten and drummer Nate Moran, Mayfield plays all the instruments herself on the tracks. The recordings tap into her trademark part-acoustic, part-electric sound and first-take, best-take energy without feeling at all backward-gazing. “It’s super loose,” she says of the new material. “There’s no bow to tie around it.”
If it hadn’t been for vinyl pressing plants getting overwhelmed, she’d have finished releasing all her new songs as 7-inches by now. However, Mayfield isn’t stressing about these hurdles.
“The beautiful thing about self-releasing all this new material is I have no one to answer to but myself. Looking back, I wouldn’t have let people pressure me as much as they did when I was young. There will always be more opportunities, and what’s meant to be won’t pass you by.”
