JOELTON MAYFIELD

Raised outside of a small central Texas city, surrounded by open farm fields and dirt roads, Mayfield was a “miracle baby,” the child his parents never truly expected after decades of trying. His family was religious and musical, two disciplines forever intertwined in their lives, both at home and at their Pentecostal church. As a kid, Mayfield won awards in the Royal Rangers, a conservative Boy Scouts alternative, for his ability to recite Bible verses; as a teenager, he began leading Wednesday night worship services for people much older than him and eventually even helming the church’s music ministry. Outside of oil-slick Contemporary Christian Music, he heard only some classic country, scant Texas blues, and the Gaithers, a family institution that was in turn a family favorite. There was no household internet, and television was censored by a draconian device called TV Guardian.

Fissures slowly grew between Mayfield and the church, Mayfield and family. He heard the words about treating people kindly but then saw how others who were not straight and white were handled by the so-called faithful. He felt exploited, too, his interest in and predisposition for music used as (largely) unpaid labor. These feelings coincided with his late discovery of songs beyond his faith. Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” exploded his idea of what a tune could accomplish, as did a web of relatively outsider songwriters—Sufjan Stevens, David Bazan, Jeff Tweedy. He began writing for himself, not only slowly finding his voice but a map of what he believed and rejected. He fled Texas for Tennessee, intuitively knowing there was more to discover than his hometown cloister of culture.

Crowd Pleaser documents the widening chasm between Mayfield, the sheltered Texas kid, and Mayfield, the burgeoning songwriter indulging in all the music, movies, relationships, books and conversations that came with leaving his sheltered early life. His sense of the bigotry, misogyny, and myopia he’d left behind sharpened, too. These songs are a map of an unraveling and the concomitant reformation, as he sorts through hypocrisies, doubts, and disappointments and does his best to make sense of them.

Many of Crowd Pleaser’s songs scan as steadfast alt-country, Mayfield digging into a bedrock of so-called Americana like a strata of sediment simply waiting to be discovered. As important, though, are the vivid signs here that he is part of a Gen Z cadre for whom Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, and Neil Young’s Harvest are part of the same firmament, not aberrations in its architecture.

Crowd Pleaser is only the first full statement from a singer-songwriter invested in the future of his chosen field.