By the winter of 2021, Joelton Mayfield had done nearly a decade of work to prepare his debut LP, Crowd Pleaser. As a teenager, he’d toiled for years as the music director of his Texas church, despite extreme doubts about Christianity’s role in his life and his role in Christian life. He’d then shipped off to Nashville, hoping to earn a music business degree in the city where they seem to be factory-made. He’d instead switched to English, studied the more mature songwriters around him, joined a series of college bands, and drifted into the edges of the city’s indie rock and alt-country enclaves, building a patchwork of players he trusted. And that February, he’d driven two trailers and several carloads of gear to a farm near Alabama’s Mobile Bay, turning the family barn of a bandmate friend into an ad hoc studio. He’d trucked a Hammond organ from Nashville and his grandmother’s century-old vibraphone from Texas, even buying a stack of area rugs to absorb the sound bouncing from the barn’s concrete floors. And then, just days before Mayfield was set to make his first full-length testimonial, the love of his young life—and the person set to co-produce the album, no less—dumped him.