Thoughts on Jessica Lea Mayfield: Tell Me
When I told some friends that I had fallen in love with Jessica Lea Mayfield’s latest work Tell Me, my announcement was met with concerned eyes. What’s wrong? Are you depressed? Are you feeling alright?—they asked.
The material from which she draws is raw, honest and dark. She writes as the scariest type of depressive: one who is bright enough to see clearly the ways in which she self-destructs and acts anyway. Mayfield’s lackadaisical singing style can come off as emotionless, but only if she is explored solely from the surface.
The beauty in Jessica Lea Mayfield’s style lies in its subtlety. The shifts in tone, both sonically and emotionally, are so slight and delicate. A minor inflection here, an off-color joke there. A barely-audible chuckle at the end of a lyric.
“Grown Man”
I’ll do anything
I’m surprised that I’m not dead yet
Or maybe, I’m disappointed
But we won’t get into that
Give me your hand, grown man
I’ll breathe some life into you
Oh, there’s not much I wouldn’t let
You whisper in my ear
If nothing else, Mayfield is an encouraging lesson in resilience. Yes, she sings of being heartbroken, fucked up and worse. But she continues to toss herself back into the fray because life is worth living. Life without these regrets and scars would be meaningless. Songs too, for that matter.
Another thought worth considering is the fact that Mayfield is often the one doing the hurting and heartbreaking in these songs. Loving and leaving the sorry fools that never had a chance in the first place.
“Nervous Lonely Night”
I didn’t mean to fuel the fire
Now I’m alone watching flames go higher
Drunk, on thoughts of you
Red wine and tequila too
Perhaps it’s disconcerting to hear a petite, fragile blonde chick so coldly dismissing old lovers. The humanity comes from the fact that she realizes the pain that she’s caused and continues to cause. She just can’t change her behavior, it’s ingrained within her. Like it or not, this is something a lot of us can relate to.
“Trouble”
I know I left you alone in New Orleans
You overheard us doing blow in the bathroom
I was kissin’, holdin’ hands
With some other girl’s grown man
You should run far from the wrong I’m doing
I will admit that I am innately drawn to almost anything Dan Auerbach digs his grubby paws into. He serves as the producer on Tell Me for his fellow Ohio native. The album was released by The Black Keys label Nonesuch Records. Auerbach does a lovely job of allowing her songwriting to remain the driving force while adding textures and sounds that give the album a depth that it would otherwise lack.
Watch Jessica Lea Mayfield perform “Our Hearts Are Wrong” on David Letterman
Written by Rob Peoni
My Morning Jacket, Todd Haynes & YouTube Throw Ultimate Record Release Bash in Louisville
What is sure to be one of the summer’s hit records officially released yesterday: My Morning Jacket’s Circuital. The band’s front man, Jim James, poignantly noted last night that in the Internet age, “Record releases aren’t what they used to be.”
Thank goodness for all of us. The show was billed, through a viral Internet advertising campaign, as Unstaged: An Original Series from American Express. Acclaimed filmmaker Todd Haynes, with whom James had worked on the Dylan biopic I’m Not There, directed the webcast.
Giants of web video YouTube and VEVO teamed with Haynes to offer three, simultaneous streaming feeds of the performance. As an objective observer, I can honestly say the quality of the live film and audio was astounding. Don’t tell American Express, but I may have paid for this experience.
“This is a strange time,” James said to the capacity crowd at Louisville’s Palace Theatre. “…I just want to thank you all for being here.”
My Morning Jacket’s genre smashing jams rollicked across the airwaves last night, thrilling more than those along the Ohio River. New tracks such as “First Light” and “Outta My System” danced along nicely with the band’s established hits of “Golden,” “Off the Record,” and “The Way that He Sings.”
Special guests included fellow Kentuckian Ben Sollee and current touring partner Daniel Martin Moore. Erykah Badu also joined MMJ for a few tracks that included a personal highlight: James singing the hook from “Tyrone.” Magic!
James is right about a few things. The very foundations of the music industry are beyond wobbling, they’ve snapped. For the moment, the benefit has landed squarely on the shoulders of the consumer. Album leaks are available weeks if not months in advance via little more than a Google search. Boundaries between consumer and thief have disappeared, not simply blurred.
On the other side of the coin, an artist’s ability to reach an audience is at an unparalleled height. All of this was on display at the Palace last night. Oh yeah, and there was some seriously good music played. If you don’t believe me, check out the highlights on My Morning Jacket’s VEVO page.
List: 70 Greatest Bob Dylan Songs of All Time
As Bob Dylan turns 70, I’m beginning to realize that it’s time for me to shit or get off the pot. I’m 25 years old as I put these words to paper. By the time Robert Allen Zimmerman had turned 25, he had penned some of the most powerful verses American popular culture had ever digested. Dylan is treated, though he may despise it, as a modern day Thomas Paine espousing his Common Sense to the willing masses of the mid-1960s.
The ‘Conscience of a Generation’ was a title that Dylan himself could never saddle. Choosing instead to recede into the background of various solo and full-band projects. Regardless which side of Bob we saw, he always had delicious material:
Sentimental Bob offered some of the greatest love songs all time—see “Boots of Spanish Leather” or “Corinna, Corinna.” Poetic Bob was as subversive as any Nobel laureate on “Desolation Row” or “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Bob and The Band proved with The Basement Tapes that they could hang with some the best bluesy bar bands in rock & roll history. It all worked because behind all of the various facades lay the same perspective. The same brilliant mind. The same observant, relevant voice.
Brought together, his collection of work is staggering, intimidating. It’s enough to make any aspiring writer’s knees buckle. How does one explain it? If nothing else is certain, there is this: Dylan was able, at various points in his life, to express the intent of his voice and beliefs in a way that is as relatable and coherent as any speaker of the modern English language.
Sorry, I’m not sorry. I don’t think one can exaggerate Dylan’s contribution to the American landscape of thought and social perspective. Call it a muse. Call it divine inspiration. Call it what you like, but the man’s discography is as significant as de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America or any other modern philosophical work.
Like any great artist, Dylan exposes his listeners to truths that they already knew about themselves. Sometimes these are conscious truths. More often, though, they are not. They are deeper truths that hadn’t occurred until that raspy Minnesotan uttered them.
Rather than continue to toss unsatisfactory superlatives on the subject, I’ll let the master do the talking. The following is my list of Dylan’s top 70 songs. I think the bard would agree that every listener comprehends and is affected by his lyrics independently. Therefore, I make no argument for this list’s definitiveness.
Though I am confident in my list as a whole, I must admit, the numbers are essentially meaningless. The songs shuffle in order of importance for me as my moods and life experiences change. The songs provided differing comforts and challenges at different stages of my hearing them. Like a long friendship, the voices change, but the essential character remains the same. Some are silly. Some are beautiful. All are fantastic.
1.) A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
2.) Visions of Johanna
3.) Like A Rolling Stone
4.) Desolation Row
5.) Tangled Up in Blue
6.) It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
7.) Masters of War
8.) Subterranean Homesick Blues
9.) Love Minus Zero/No Limit
10.) Simple Twist of Fate
11.) Boots of Spanish Leather
12.) All Along the Watchtower
13.) Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door
14.) Forever Young
15.) When I Paint My Masterpiece
16.) Highway 61 Revisited
17.) It’s Alright Ma, I’m only Bleeding
18.) Dark Eyes
19.) Song to Woody
20.) Gotta Serve Somebody
21.) Crash on the Levee
22.) Hurricane
23.) Fourth Time Around
24.) To Ramona
25.) Maggie’s Farm
26.) Satisfied Mind
27.) Just Like a Woman
28.) The Lonsesome Death of Hattie Carrol
29.) Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
30.) Shelter from the Storm
31.) Things Have Changed
32.) Corrina, Corrina
33.) Oxford Town
34.) I’ll Keep it With Mine
35.) Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
36.) Meet Me in the Morning
37.) Ballad of Hollis Brown
38.) Buckets of Rain
39.) I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine
40.) Gates of Eden
41.) Went to See the Gypsy
42.) I Threw it All Away
43.) My Back Pages
44.) You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere
45.) Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream
46.) Goin’ to Acupulco
47.) Billy 1
48.) Day of the Locusts
49.) Chimes of Freedom
50.) Oh, Sister
51.) Girl from the North Country
52.) It Takes a Lot to Laugh It Takes a Train to Cry
53.) Temporarily Like Achilles
54.) One of Us Must Know
55.) If You See Her, Say Hello
56.) She Belongs to Me
57.) Rainy Day Women No.’s 12 & 35
58.) Positively 4th Street
59.) Slow Train
60.) The Wicked Messenger
61.) If Not for You
62.) The Man in Me
63.) The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)
64.) I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)
65.) Early Mornin’ Rain
66.) Every Grain of Sand
67.) Katie’s Been gone
68.) Lay Lady Lay
69.) Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)
70.) Million Dollar Bash
