Bayou Beats: Storytime with Hal Mayfield and the Velvet Cowboys

NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD HAL MAYFIELD doesn’t think of himself as a young musician. In measured sentences and mindful pauses, he takes his time to explain that when it comes to music he sticks to the present moment. “I try to just think about what I want to be doing,” he says, “I try to hold myself to the same standard than anybody else.” Mayfield looks like a blond version of a young Townes Van Zant, tall and lanky, with a tentative gaze and a slightly furrowed brow. But his introspective rhetoric reveals an old soul under the guise of untamed youth, a facet packaged into his songs and delivered in his new LP Ghost Stories.

ARTICLE BY VANELIS RIVERA | PORTRAITS BY ANDREW BAILEY |
LIVE SHOTS BY MILES JORDAN

“Calhoun, only Calhoun,” is where Mayfield says he is from. At seven he knew he wanted to be a musician, and at ten he began to make strides toward that desire. He doesn’t know where it came from, but at some point his ten-year-old self said, “I want to play bluegrass.” (Seeing his dad play and sing on guitar may have helped that decision.) His trek into American roots music began with learning the fiddle and violin; he dabbled on his own at first, then took directions from his grandad. Though beginning with “corny bluegrass stuff,” he quickly turned to the vibes that would stick like Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Bob Dylan—virtuosos of American folk. Contemporary bands like Old Crow Medicine Show and Nickel Creek quickly made their way into his music roster, cementing his attention to the genre and nudging his interest onward.

His first “serious” song was written at fifteen, and it was about gambling. At that point, he wrote complete fiction, trying to emulate the old Americana songs of his early years. He continued writing more fiercely at sixteen, aided by music lessons from Monroe’s beloved captain of music, Dan Sumner. Most of the songs in his first LP Who to Believe (2017) were arranged and recorded in Sumner’s studio, Fort Sumner. “They sounded like a sixteen year old wrote them, unfortunately, for the most part,” Mayfield says as he quickly brushes the memory off, immediately recognizing that his first steps were elemental. While he considers his first LP “straightforward,” folksy-sounding acoustics layered with drums and some electric guitar, he also asserts that he was working toward something. Around 2016, Sumner got him a timely gig at the Nela Music Awards. There, Hal was able to play behind Monroe music legend Toussaint McCall—American R&B singer and organist, known for his major success “Nothing Takes the Place of You.” A musical coming of age was taking place, which would soon turn into a whirlwind of crafty song building and a 2018 album tour that spanned Texas, Kansas, and Colorado.

Around town, Mayfield is usually spotted playing solo gigs, but since his junior year at West Ouachita High School, he has had a music accomplice—Cole Deriso, who Mayfield describes as alternating between “pawpaw and standard college boy, but sometimes both at once.” Deriso learned to play the drums to start playing with Mayfield, and at that time, the two “cycled through bass players.” It wasn’t until recently that Brindan Reece Eisler joined as lead guitar as well as Astro Motel’s very own eclectic “spacebilly” bassist, Jacob “Jake” Lofton. These are Mayfield’s “velvet cowboys.” When they first started dating, Mayfield’s girlfriend had a dream in which a man approached her during a Downtown Art Crawl and said, “Uh, velvet cowboys.” Only slightly “shook,” she kept walking to suddenly find herself in the streets of New Orleans where Mayfield and Deriso were playing surrounded by a bizzare number of amps and speakers, wearing—nothing other than—velvet suits. There was no disputing providence at that point.
The “original plan” for his second recording was to release an EP before a tour they planned that didn’t come together as scheduled. That gave way to more writing time, and two songs naturally turned into ten. His first two songs were about fictional dead people, which gave him an idea: “Oooh, spooky. Spooky town. Let’s do that.” Only subtle hints of spook are woven into the songs in Ghost Stories, released November 2018. At times, his lyrics juxtapose the gloomy and glorious, revealing an attraction to nostalgia and hallowed reverence to the morbid, like in “Die Young”: Sometimes I guess it’d be alright to die young. High up on the mountain, standing in the sun. Like a little bird that flies through the trees. She’ll never make it when she’s too old to sing.

Most of his songwriting is imagery-based, visually pulling from his surroundings. Mayfield wrote “Monroe” (a nod to our town) while sitting on a bench in downtown Desiard: Sunlight streams between the buildings. Shadow’s lights still on the ground. Fossils of the roaring twenties. Quiet ghosts just hang around. It makes it easier, he says, “not having to come up with a specific idea out of nowhere. It works a lot better to have ideas packaged in something really concrete, instead of just talking about it.” This feat is accomplished in the song “The Ghost of Jerry Wolf,” where he daydreamed about a ghost hanging around a dining room while a young couple fought over the ghost’s antics. “Stuff like that, you can assign whatever thoughts or ideas to it, which I like a lot. Something without having to plan it out,” explains Mayfield. It seems his muses are always hard at work to send him peculiar yarns of fiction at unbecoming hours. The song “One Hundred Years Ago” arrived when he woke up in the middle of the night and typed the whole song through on his phone. The song begins like most engaging stories do, with curiosity: I wonder what this town was like a hundred years ago. Before the people went away. Before the stores all closed. Do you think there was a boy like me who loved a girl like you?

Loosely folk rock, Mayfield’s sound palate can be described as minimalistic Southwest Americana. In Ghost Stories, Mayfield uses a plug-in on a “cheap digital piano” and bass to create a subtle 8-bit effect, giving the piano a distorted, “more crunchy” sound, while the bass emulates a synth. Taking cues from his experience with Sumner, he recorded the album on his own, starting at his parents’ house when he still lived there, then completing it in his makeshift studio and trailer house out in the woods of Calhoun.

Currently, Mayfield is a freshman at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature, which unquestionably has a hand in the songs he writes. “I know some people don’t care about lyrics that much, but if the lyrics and the music can both stand on their own,” he says, “then the union of both is akin to magic.” He’s been know to sit alone in his bathroom until he comes up with songs. Even his prose writing serves as an instrument for composing songs, like in “Martyr,” which began as a free-write that he considers has a strong “fictionness.”

Mayfield is already conceiving his next album. “I’ve been really thinking about moving to somewhere toward, like, early B-52’s. Something really wacky. Like country B-52’s,” he smirks. His new songs are a bit dancier and explore descriptive, dreamy episodes, animated by his interest in the songwriting of Tom Waits and early Modest Mouse. “I like music that the song’s context is somewhat obscure,” continues Mayfield. He adds that he likes conceptual records that are themed, “especially sound-wise, like the textures and the way it’s orchestrated.” Recently he’s thought about general stage aesthetic and has found a fondness for the playful and charming. For a future live show, he’s thinking of painting a middle-school-play-looking backdrop of a living room scene and accenting the scene with fake house plants that would rest on amps. There’s a playfulness to what he’s drawn to, as well as a maturity to keeping it simple and fun.

In a paisley shirt that he wore just to “give off some positive energy,” Mayfield reveals to BayouLife that his career aspirations are “playing for people, making albums, and writing better songs.” Moving in artistic directions is more important to him than choosing music as his only source of income: “I think it’s weird that people think you have to be only an artist to be a good artist.” Cool, simple, and interesting storylines spearhead Mayfield’s music, and rely on curious ears and imaginative appetites. He believes that, “Art is very much a team effort. People consuming it is really important.” At times goofy, but always pleasing, Hal Mayfield and the Velvet Cowboys are reviving tall tales and legends in the form of laid-back polished music with a touch of edge, and potentially, velvet suits.

Follow Hal Mayfield and the Velvet Cowboys on Facebook and Instagram to stay in-the-know of upcoming live performances and their summer tour. You can listen to their music on Bandcamp, Spotify, Youtube, and iTunes.