Kevin Bronson on May 22nd, 2018

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“Life has a funny way of showing up with the same old lesson,” Hayley Johnson intones at the end of her new single as The Little Miss, “and until you’ve learned it, it’ll follow you over mountain and sea.”

If you take away nothing from the song except that lesson about lessons, “A Ride Along the Mountain Valley” has accomplished its mission. It’s a shuffling, two-chord salve for heartache — punctuated by whistling to boot — that abides the great traditions of folk music and the talking blues. In Johnson’s rich voice and sepia-toned lyrical landscapes of roads, mountains and valleys, there are some stubborn truths. Like how fine the line is between sad and mad.

“[The song] was something I wrote in a state of deep despair,” Johnson says. ” I don’t think I knew what I was writing at the time — I wasn’t aware of whether or not it was ‘good,’ or even, consciously, of the story I was telling. I just started strumming two chords back and forth and the pain dribbled out. My relationship at the time had taken a rather heartbreaking turn, and so I told the story through the lens of a made-up, old time-y world that I created in order to cope.

“Typically, the more story-driven a song is, the more unbearable the pain was. I can imagine other players and different endings that aren’t necessarily my own, and it helps me to close a painful chapter that otherwise feels abstract and unresolved.”

“A Ride Along the Mountain Valley,” a lo-fi version of which appears on the collection “Pollyanna” released late last year, is the latest single from the San Diego native who has released but a handful of songs since she moved to L.A. about four years ago.

||| Stream: “A Ride Along the Mountain Valley”

||| Live: The Little Miss performs Saturday at the Boogiewoman Festival No. 2 at the Vortex. She also plays July 22 at the Love Song bar in downtown L.A.