When I spoke to Jessica Lea Mayfield, she was standing outside her hotel next to a giant cornfield in Iowa. The night before, she and her band, which includes her husband Jesse Newport, played their first gig of a summer tour in support of her recently released and critically acclaimed album, Make My Head Sing… (ATO). The 24-year-old singer-songwriter can’t help but mention how the show was outdoors and the audience got soaked during a rainstorm, but is also cheerfully optimistic and thankful that those in attendance enjoyed her music enough to brave the storm. This makes sense when you hear her new album, which is not only the type of gloomy rock that is, in a way, perfect to take in during a rainstorm, but it also may be Mayfield’s most impressive work to date.
Whereas her previous album Tell Me — produced by Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach — carried elements of country and pop music, Mayfield’s latest is ten songs of stripped down, raw rock and roll. It also feels deeply personal. She bares her pains and emotions over a barrage of heavy, feedback-laced riffing that brings to mind grunge rock with hints of shoegaze. This is interesting when you consider Mayfield was raised singing bluegrass tunes with her musician parents. For someone so young, Jessica Lea Mayfield comes across on Make My Head Sing… as confident that this is the music she has always wanted to create, music that she can bring to a stage and let loose in true rock and roll fashion.
Neil Ferguson: It’s been said that your new album is a lot louder and different than your previous work. What drove you to do a bigger, brasher sound?
Jessica Lea Mayfield: I guess for me it’s just self-expression. With this record, I really had the opportunity to make the record that I’ve always wanted to make, and to really be able to take my time and use my lyrics and guitar. It’s weird because with [my first two albums] Tell Me and With Blasphemy So Heartfelt there was a time clamp on my creativity, and then you’re working with other people in their space. [When it was] five o’clock and time for everybody to go home I [was still] working, still writing. With [Make My Head Sing…] it was just great to be able to rent out a studio and be able to stay there all day and all night to work, plus hang out and try to keep going until I could do better than I knew I could do. I really love recording and being in the studio, and that’s a big passion of my husband’s as well. My brother [David Mayfield] is a Grammy-nominated producer and I grew up recording with him, so I thought this would be a good chance to record on my own and with Jesse [Newport], who knows me really well. I wouldn’t have wanted to do it any other way.
Can you talk about the creative dynamic between you and your husband — what did you each bring to the table as far as songwriting and overall production?
I wrote all of the songs and Jesse engineered the record and played bass, and we produced it together. The thing that’s interesting is that his creativity really shines in the little things, like effects on a vocal, or he would just find me sounds that he would know I’d love. A lot of times he would have something in mind or I would, and the other one would just know it, like reading each other’s minds. It’s like you know what your husband wants for breakfast, it’s kind of like that in the studio to an extreme because you’re making something that has a lot of personal undertones as well about your lives.
Did you ever have one of those moments where you brought a song to the table that maybe highlighted something dark and personal, and Jesse was like, “are you sure you want to put that out there?”
No, that’s one thing about Jesse. I’ve definitely had boyfriends in the past who’ve been like, “you can’t say that.” When I was working on my first record with Dan [Auerbach of the Black Keys], I’d come home with a couple tracks and I’d play them for my first boyfriend, and every time he’d hear a new song he’d break up with me. Jesse obviously was aware that I sang about personal things before we even met, and he had known me through friends. The one thing I didn’t do is tell him the lyrics to the songs; he didn’t get to hear the lyrics until I sang my vocals. You can take things out of context if you read them before you hear them, and it would be emotional because it was the first time he was hearing me say these things about us. It did feel really heavy at times, but I think it was a good intimacy. We were a little bit worried that it would be a little too personal and intimate to record songs about us together, but it worked out. We didn’t kill each other and I think we grew.
Much of the album, especially on songs like “Party Drugs,” carries a dark undertone, which is mostly in the instrumentation. Did you set out to give the album that feel?
I wasn’t going to make an album that didn’t have that sort of feel. I’m only 24 now, and I was in the search of trying to figure out what got my goat. You gotta figure out who you are and what you like, and now I’m having the most fun playing shows with this record. The live shows are really fun and I feel like I’ve got more control. It’s like, why would I not want to hear my favorite sounds every night, like the guitar sounds that get me wet and make me giggle [laughs].
Speaking of that sound, you’ve often cited Foo Fighters as a major influence. What is it about their sound that you find so enlightening, and do you think it’s generational?
I don’t really listen to them a lot these days and I haven’t heard a lot of their new stuff. There’s some kind of weird thing going on there where it’s sort of become this Mickey Mouse type entity, but I could just be imagining that. They were one of the bands I liked when I was a little girl. When I was 7 years-old I saw the video for “My Hero” and it looked like they were having a lot of fun and I just remember thinking, I’m going to do this for the rest of my life, I’m going to play music. I haven’t gotten into what they’re doing these days, which is probably because they’ve kept up with the times and I haven’t. They’ve evolved and teenagers like their music now, and I can’t stand a lot of the stuff that is popular right now. I’m always going to be stuck in a time warp of when I thought things sounded good and everybody should’ve stopped [laughs].
So in your opinion what’s missing from today’s rock music?
Well, it’s like these days you go to see a band, and you’re lucky if they have a fucking guitar amp on the stage at all. You go to see a rock band and you’re like, ‘where are the fucking amps?!’ Then you [see] that they’re plugged in direct and there’s a guy at the soundboard with a computer, and [you] realize that they’re playing along with the record – the drummer has headphones on! What happened to people playing off of each other and playing together? I wouldn’t want to play guitar and not be able to have my fucking amp onstage making my ears bleed. The whole fun is plugging in. It’s like a farce, all these huge [acts] that want to act like a band but they’re playing along to a computer. They can’t change one thing because the computer isn’t another person who you can nod at, you know? I guess [rock music] has lost a lot of its personalism, grit and sloppiness. I want to see people fuck up.
This article was originally published on The Horn, an online publication based out of Austin, Texas.
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