We love the detached delivery of singer-songwriter Jessica Lea Mayfield.  Despite her stoic but simmering stance in song, there’s always a line or a look that gives her away.  Take, for example, her song Sometimes at Night in which she opens with these lines: “I broke the little cabana boy’s heart, to let you fondle me in the dark; one of those city outdoor motels, in your bed swore I never would tell.”  She’s got a bit of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler in her.  Song noir, if you will.

And now Mayfield’s done it again.  A new video has been released of her singing a new song entitled Do I Have The Time To Do The Things I Wanna Do When You’re Away?  The song’s title gives the impression it’s by a woman anxious for a break from her lover.  But you quickly surmise that instead the song is from the perspective of a woman obsessing over that lover and demanding to know where she stands in the relationship (“So if you don’t see what you need in me, then let me go/know”).  And then after a few strums too many, out-of-the-blue Mayfield let’s the other shoe drop:  “Let me know, so I can let this chair beneath me go.”  It’s unnerving stuff, made more so by Mayfield’s placid, but world-weary, delivery.  Long live Jessica Lea Mayfield.