Get behind me, Jesus

I'll admit to being someone who has difficulty admitting to liking country. I usually lump it in with hip hop and polka as a genre that is probably okay for other people to enjoy and support, but starkly uninteresting, perhaps even inapplicable, to me. This is partly because like a lot of post-punk retired riot grrls, I have trouble separating enthusiasm for music from identifying with a community, and I just don't much identify with street life, polka parties or cowboy culture.

Nevertheless, I've found myself utterly obsessed with the music of Jessica Lea Mayfield. I suppose it's also possible to categorize Mayfield as folk. Or ambient. Or soul. Or bluegrass. But rather that get into a debate on the pros and cons of music taxonomies, I'll get to the part where I talk about how much I like Mayfield's music. First things first, she's as cute as a button, looking like a woodland sprite gone hay field. In the midst of getting to know music by the Black Keys, I found that they'd worked with her on her album, which instantly appealed to me because it has a kickass name: With Blasphemy So Heartfelt. Mostly though, I like her because her voice just blows me away. It's twangy and fallow and heady. It's true that her lyrics sound like a 19 year old girl dealing with heartbreak for the first time, presumably because she's, you know, 19 and maybe dealing with heartbreak for the first time. But I think setting aside a place for simple music, especially when it's pretty, is a worthwhile thing, because simplicity is by definition protected from pretension. Partly for this reason, I think, I guiltlessly hum and sing (and occasionally belt out) her lyrics for weeks at a time. Her song "I Can't Lie to You" was at one point so embedded in my mind that I realized I'd been singing it continuously for the better part of an hour while cleaning my apartment. Maybe because she's been performing since she was eight, her live shows are delightful. During last year's CMJ, I saw her play at Maxwell's, and she plays some songs live on NPR , which, in addition to containing some stellar solo songs, includes the revelation that she plays shows with her dad's guitar, which may or may not be the cutest damn thing ever.

So maybe liking Jessica Lea Mayfield doesn't count as bravely branching out into new musical boundaries. She's not so far away from certain songs by bands firmly entrenched in the femme punk lexicon (Fuzzy is the first band that comes to mind, but there's also a raft of musicians who love to reclaim country songs for their own uses, like the Dollyrots) and I don't think she'll haul me away into a raging enthusiasm for Lee Ann Womack or Dolly Parton. But there's something about her unapologetic cuteness and authenticity that makes it easy to be unapologetic about liking her songs, even if it strays from a general preference for angrier, more complicated music.