Jessica Lea Mayfield: Look At Miss Ohio

“With this album, I did a tour with Dan Auerbach for his solo record – it was him and Justin Townes Earle and we did a month long tour – and I got home and every experience that I experienced I wrote about. There’s maybe three songs that are older, and the rest of the songs I wrote in a week’s period all about the same subject. And I kind of got hit with this three-songs-a-day sorta thing and it was really impacting my life [laughs].

“It was just weird because I had all these other songs that I was going to record, then I just started writing all these songs that I and everyone else thought were better. I don’t even know how – it’s weird like that. I guess I just got, uh, over-emotioned [laughs].

“Print that and see what the spellchecker says!”

Unsurprisingly, spell-check wasn’t too keen on over-emotioned, but then again the complexity of human emotion takes more computing power than our word processor has to offer. Truthfully, the only way to get a real handle on the depth and breadth of the human condition is through an artist’s gaze, a field of vision attuned to more than just the material plane which we all inhabit. We, as a species, look to art to help us understand the worlds within and beyond ourselves, to help us comprehend the constant data streaming in and out of our brains. And while it might be a tad early to call it, the reaction to Tell Me and the stellar, progressive folk rock of songs like “Sometimes At Night,” “Run Myself Into The Ground” and “Grown Man” point toward an artist that can connect on that level across generations and social barriers.

“I get those people that need to tell me how much listening to my music helped them get through their divorce, ya know? And then I’m holding crying men in their forties…”

Yeah, things have definitely started to get weird.