10/21/2025
🌟 DEBUT ALBUM SPOTLIGHT 🌟
JOELTON MAYFIELD ~ "CROWD PLEASER"
Joelton Mayfield will release his DEBUT ALBUM, “Crowd Pleaser” on 10/24 via Bloodshot Records!
By the winter of 2021, Mayfield had done nearly a decade of work to prepare his debut album. As a teenager, he toiled for years as the music director of his Texas church, despite doubts about Christianity’s role in his life.
Eventually, he shipped off to Nashville & studied the songwriters around him, joined a series of college bands, & drifted into the edges of the city’s indie rock & alt-country enclaves, building a patchwork of players he trusted in the process.
In February of 2021, Joelton drove two trailers and several carloads of gear to a farm near Alabama’s Mobile Bay, turning the family barn of a bandmate friend into an ad hoc studio. Days before Mayfield was set to make his first full-length testimonial, he experienced a shattering breakup.
He was moody, distraught, and distracted, yet he was surrounded by musical friends from Texas and Nashville, recording songs that had, in a way, already saved his life. Alongside a band that sometimes numbered nearly a dozen, Mayfield rendered these ten songs with radical urgency, clinging to his own words like a life preserver.
"Crowd Pleaser" documents the widening chasm between Mayfield’s former identity as a sheltered Texas kid and his identity as a burgeoning songwriter indulging in the music, movies, relationships, books & conversations previously unknown to him. 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 stratum of sediment simply waiting to be discovered.
Mayfield & a band that sometimes numbered nearly a dozen rendered the album’s 10 songs with radical urgency.
He clung to his own words, like a life preserver or guardrail or any piece of art that simply reminds someone that this world can always change for worse but especially better.
Indebted to traditions of incisive Southern storytellers & country-rock bands interested in upending their forms, "Crowd Pleaser" squares up to the difficulties and betrayals of Mayfield’s first quarter-century & makes the absolute most of them—10 compelling affirmations for the rest of us.
These songs are a map of an unraveling and the concomitant reformation, as he sorts through hypocrisies, doubts, & disappointments and does his best to make sense of them.
In 2024, a year before "Crowd Pleaser" was even ready for release, Mayfield opened several shows for two heroes—John Darnielle, of the aforementioned Mountain Goats, and John Moreland.
Both have used songwriting to stare into personal voids, to stand at the edge of some never-ending abyss & tell the truth about what they’ve seen down there.
Mayfield is a new member of that tradition, having put some of the most difficult lessons he’s learned in life to paper & then gathering his friends to help animate them, to turn them into these songs meant to be shared like communion.
“God’s children never grow up,” goes that refrain. Yes, some of them just grow into something unexpected: songwriters able to relay the good news that can exist in passing through the hardest of times & emerging on another side, able to sing about it.
TO PRE-SAVE
🌟 https://joeltonmayfield.lnk.to/crowdpleaser
