Jessica Lea Mayfield didn’t just make a breakup record—she made a survival manual. Sorry Is Gone, her 2017 album, was written while she was still in the middle of an abusive marriage, and she’s not vague about what pushed her to write. “I was in a lot of physical and emotional pain and I wanted to change things,” she told me. “I kept waiting for someone to come along and help. Then I realized—I needed to come along and help. I needed to learn to love myself and not put up with bullcrap from anybody.”
The record became that lifeline. “When I write songs, it’s almost like I’m having a talk with myself,” she explained. “Like an older, wiser version of me giving the pep talk I needed as a teenager.”
The pep talks weren’t abstract. Mayfield spoke plainly about domestic violence, something she endured for years and once thought was just “normal.” “I spent a lot of my life thinking everybody gets beat up by their partner, they just don’t talk about it,” she said. “That silence is what keeps it going. Eighty percent of women’s hospital visits are from domestic violence injuries—and that’s underreported. People aren’t afraid to talk about car accidents, but this? People don’t want to hear it. So I feel like I have to talk about it.”
Even her old photos look different now. On the Elliott Smith tribute she cut with Seth Avett, Mayfield looks spectral, and she admits she basically was. “I wasn’t eating. I was hoping I would die so I wouldn’t have to deal with being abused,” she said. Elliott’s music—famously bleak—wasn’t an escape. “If I’m having a bad day, I want to hear someone who feels the way I do, so I don’t feel alone. I didn’t want happy music.”
Therapy and support groups eventually gave her footing, but it was the songs that pulled her out of ghost-mode. The title track, the line “I’ve been through hell,” the jagged guitars—those weren’t stylistic experiments, they were survival tactics. “Writing these songs was how I got back to feeling like a human again,” she said.
For once, the studio itself wasn’t a battlefield. “No drama, no problems—just this perfect atmosphere,” she said of recording with Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth and a supportive band around her. “I’m a magnet for drama, so when things don’t go wrong, I’m like, what’s happening?”
If Mayfield’s music still sounds haunted, her day-to-day isn’t. “People tell me I smile all the time, which you wouldn’t expect. But for me, I’m not dead, and that makes me happy. I see a fluffy dog, I drink a margarita, and I’m like—I’m alive. Look, there’s a bird.”
She laughs at how absurdly simple her joy has become, but it’s genuine. “Every day, I’m thankful to be alive,” she said. Sorry Is Gone was her way of making sure of it.
Listen to the interview above and then check out "Sorry Is Gone" below.
