Twangville Songwriter Showcase live stream

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. 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.