Before Tipitina’s: Getting to Know Joelton Mayfield

Meet Joelton Mayfield: Texas native, Nashville transplant, and your newest favorite alt-country artist.

Crowd Pleaser, his recently released debut album, was nearly a decade in the making – and it was well worth the wait. I spoke with Mayfield ahead of his upcoming shows opening for Futurebirds, including his November 13th performance at Tipitina’s in New Orleans. What followed was a conversation about growing up inside the church and the long road that carried these songs from college shows to barn walls.

Crowd Pleaser holds songs that span years of his life—tracks written in college alongside songs born from the stillness and uncertainty of 2020. The result is a project that feels deeply lived in: vulnerable, sharp, and full of the haunting spiritual inheritance he’s been unpacking for most of his life. 

Mayfield grew up in the church—literally on stage, singing at just three years old. “They had me singing for special programs when I was really young. So I grew up on contemporary Christian music and Southern gospel.” Religion wasn’t just a backdrop. It was the air he breathed. His family on his father’s side were traveling evangelists, and his grandmother could play virtually anything—organ, pedal steel, you name it.

But there was another musical thread woven in early, something that cracked the door open to the wider world. “My other grandmother was my first exposure to alternatives,” he laughs. “She always had great country music on when I was at her house—George Jones, Charlie Pride, Dolly Parton.” Those songs, he says, were the first time he realized music didn’t have to be only about God. “It was the first time I thought I could make something of my own.”  

The album is part spiritual excavation, part personal reckoning. Musically, the influences behind Crowd Pleaser are an expansive mix including Gillian Welch, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost is Born, and Big Thief. The album’s opener, Red Beam, sets the tone immediately. “The narrator of that song is having a panic attack at sunrise, that’s the setting. Dropping the listener right into that just felt right,” he explains. “It’s kind of a dirge-like song, it’s hymnal, it’s drowning and noisy. It’s like a fun red herring for the record.”

Six of the tracks date back to his college years, the songs that once lit up the room when he played them live. “They were the crowd pleasers. [They] made it to a point where I felt like they had to be recorded. It felt like honoring the arrangements and what they meant to me then.” The other four songs were written in 2020, when Mayfield was unemployed and, like the rest of the world, stuck inside. “It was a way of processing,” he says. “A lot of the record deals with religious trauma, or just unpacking the upbringing I had and trying to move past it.” Threads emerge across the tracklist—recurring phrases, echoes of the same emotional knot turning over again and again. 

“Around 2020 I realized I had enough for a full record, so I started looking for the lines that tied everything together.” The recording process began in early 2021, when he and a group of friends took over a bandmate’s family farm for 3 months. They packed up all their gear, including his grandmother’s century-old vibraphone, and recorded this record. Bringing Crowd Pleaser to its final form took an additional two years of work. "It always takes longer than you think it will," Mayfield said.

Following the album’s release, Mayfield is preparing to bring Crowd Pleaser on the road, joining Futurebirds for a run of shows – including a stop at the famous Tipitina’s in New Orleans. Though he’s played in the Crescent City multiple times before, this will be his first time opening for a larger audience in a storied room. “Tipitina’s is legendary,” he says. “I’m really looking forward to that one.”

Fans can expect a full-band performance, and a little bit of chaos in the best way. “Futurebirds likes to rock, so we’re gonna rock,” he says, “I’m a words-first guy, but I also love to get freaky on guitar, we’re gonna have some fun with it.” Particularly he notes Speechwriter as his favorite to play live: “We kind of stretch it out live – it gets a little motorik, a little crowdy. It’s cathartic every night.”

As the album continues to find ears, Mayfield is simply grateful that these songs still feel alive to him, saying,"For a record we really made four years ago, I’m just glad I still have fun playing them." If you’re near New Orleans, consider this your sign. Come hear Crowd Pleaser the way it was meant to be heard, live at Tipitina’s.