Two of our favorite albums of 2025 came from Ben de la Cour and Joelton Mayfield, and this month we get to put them on the same stage. De la Cour calls his songs “night songs,” and on New Roses he plays nearly every instrument himself. Mayfield’s Crowd Pleaser, his first full-length, was close to a decade in the making. The common thread between them is songs that command attention.
The two will trade songs at Club Passim in Cambridge on Tuesday, October 20, and at Café Wha? in Greenwich Village on Wednesday, October 21. Get to know them through the videos below, then come hear these songs close enough to catch every word.
MEET THE ARTISTS
Joelton Mayfield
Joelton Mayfield grew up outside a small central Texas city, running his church’s music ministry as a teenager before Dylan and a run of outsider songwriters gave him somewhere else to put his questions. He left for Nashville, traded a music business degree for an English one, played in a series of college bands, and spent most of a decade building toward a debut.
He made it in February 2021, in a family barn near Alabama’s Mobile Bay, with a Hammond organ trucked from Nashville and his grandmother’s century-old vibraphone from Texas. Days before the session, the woman he loved, who was also set to co-produce, ended the relationship. Crowd Pleaser came out of the three weeks that followed: ten songs about hypocrisy, doubt, and disappointment, played by a band that sometimes numbered close to a dozen. He’s since opened shows for John Moreland, American Aquarium, and Futurebirds.
Ben de la Cour
Ben de la Cour’s visceral songwriting weaves evocative stories of desperate characters with his signature “Americanoir” sound, shining an empathetic, raw, and at times bleak light on the human condition. Raised in Brooklyn, he lived in London, Cuba, and across the United States before settling in the American South over a decade and a half ago, drawing inspiration from writers and musicians alike—Townes Van Zandt, Jimi Hendrix, Nick Cave, Nina Simone, Leonard Cohen, James Baldwin, and Carson McCullers among them. His gothic folk songs create fully realized worlds populated by down-and-out characters trying to make it through.
New Roses is de la Cour’s sixth album, following his 2023 Grammy-shortlisted Sweet Anhedonia. It grew out of late-night writing and recording sessions at his home, where he experimented with layering synthesizers and looping sounds, electric guitar, and acoustic fingerpicking. De la Cour plays every instrument on the record except fiddle and trumpet, and the songs balance doom and optimism, seeking out kernels of hope in the darkness.
About the author: Mild-mannered corporate executive by day, excitable Twangville denizen by night.