COVER STORY | Faye Webster’s New Era is Just Another Thing

There’s a recurring theme in all of Faye Webster’s press around her latest album, Underdressed at the Symphony: The Atlanta musician isn’t much interested in playing in being famous, or something akin to that measure. It makes sense, though, given that Webster self-released her first record—Run and Tell—when she was only 16 and signed with Secretly Canadian when she was barely 21. Flash-forward a year and her third album, Atlanta Millionaires Club—named after her dad’s group of graduate school friends who’d compete in donut-eating contests and 5Ks—completely broke the mold for contemporary folk pop, as Webster made an alt-country record with a rap feature and laced R&B-infatuated tunes with hues of pedal steel. But transcending the confines of genre doesn’t mean you have to explain why you did it in the first place.

Though she is cut from the same youth-turned-critically-acclaimed musician cloth as Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, we rarely think of Faye Webster as such. She was, at one time, a teen idol (or, at least, the 2010s indie version of that designation, whatever that’s worth) and, now, she’s a Zoomer adult who doesn’t quite coalesce with the TikTok virality songs of hers like “I Know You,” “Right Side of My Neck” and “Jonny” have garnered. The former alone has been used in more than 355,000 individual videos on the platform, but don’t expect to catch Webster chasing down any sort of trend. She’s barely even on the internet beyond her Instagram page, which is largely reserved for tour highlights, yo-yo content and Pokémon plushies.

Webster drinks out of a Bart Simpson cup, became the poster child for cobalt blue, collaborated with Goose Island on a peach lager and even made an Animal Crossing-style web game for her new song “Lego Ring.” The last few months, she’s been playing a lot of Fortnite—though none of her music has yet hit the game’s Battle Royale radio. Though she just put out an album last Friday, Webster’s next goal is loftier: “My dream is to get in Rocket League,” she says. “They have these player anthems that play when you score, and I really want one of my songs there.” Webster is a vibe merchant who, sometimes, is caught on an Instagram story eating fried chicken ice cream with Lil Yachty and Tyler, The Creator and, sometimes, misses her old thrift haunt Highland Row, which closed during the pandemic (now, she frequents the Mother Lode in Decatur).

I do think, by definition, Faye Webster, now 26, is one of music’s most famous anti-celebrities—paradoxically, of course. In our conversation, it takes her about 15 minutes to really warm up to the back-and-forth, and much of those moments deal with a lot of “I don’t know” gestures. But it’s never a mark of Webster having some disinterest in the ideas that I’ve brought to the table for her; instead, she just doesn’t think of the details much beyond what they are: details. She’s honest about how, at the end of the day, she doesn’t set out to make an album like it’s some grand, necessary task at any time. Instead, she’s frank about how, when an album does come, it’s because she’s collected X amount of songs over time and decides that, yes, that’s enough for a whole record. Ask her about her craft of saying a lot by singing a little, and her reply arrives as succinctly as her verses: “That’s the kind of songwriter I am,” she says over Zoom in Australia, just days away from playing her first gig of 2024. “I never really think about it. It just happens.”

That kind of answer is pretty common from songwriters, but it rarely gets shared in print. I myself could build a village out of the soundbites I have from musicians who share the same sentiment and, in most cases, I’d agree that not including them in stories is a fair choice to make. But, with Faye Webster, her cut-to-the-chase, quick-resolve philosophy towards her own creative process is exactly what makes her work so resounding in the first place. She loves talking about her band—Matt “Pistol” Stoessel, Nick Rosen, Bryan Howard, Charles Garner, Paul Stevens, Annie Leeth, Henry White, Heather McIntosh and Henry White—but abhors having much of her personal life (including her dog’s real name) become too public. Take a song like “Feeling Good Today”: “I might open my doors, I got exterminators so it doesn’t matter if bugs come in,” she sings. “That way, my dog goes outside. My neighbors know his name, thought that was weird but I’m over it.”

Faye Webster’s 2021 album I Know I’m Funny haha placed a non-negotiable balance onto Webster’s inclinations to pair monotonous sadness with a gut-bustingly quick wit. She had that on Atlanta Millionaires Club, too, especially on a song like “Jonny,” where she delivered this bonkers-good verse: “I want to be happy / Find a man with an old name just like me / And get over how my dog is my best friend / And he doesn’t even know what my name is.” But on I Know I’m Funny haha, it ramped up even further, as Webster added an extra dash of lovableness and lamented “We go through phases when we’re over ours / Right now we both want to be rockstars / Got you a bass last year on your birthday / The same one the guy from Linkin Park plays / But you look better with it anyways” on the title track.

In 2022, Webster put out Car Therapy Sessions, an EP of five songs—most culled from her pre-existing discography, like “Sometimes” and “Kind Of,” and “Car Therapy,” a completely new joint—performed with a 24-piece orchestra conducted by Trey Pollard and produced by Drew Vandenberg. It was an audacious pivot then (and one she’d been plotting since as far back as 2018), as drum tracks and flickers of pedal steel were substituted for measures of cello, guitar solos reconfigured on the violin and hues of oboe, bassoon, French horn and timpani. But, more than anything, it took Webster out of her comfort zone—and doing so led to some of her best vocal performances ever, especially on the title track and “Kind Of (Type of Way).”

“Even though they were my songs, I felt like I was the one that was learning it or trying to keep up with everyone else,” Webster says, “because I was like, ‘I’ve never heard my music like that before.’ It was really overwhelming. I’m a very gentle singer already, but I feel like that made me think about, when singing certain words, really putting emotion into the definition of whatever word it was.”

Underdressed at the Symphony arrives like a proper companion piece to I Know I’m Funny haha—and a final act to an unofficial, unauthorized album trilogy dating back to Atlanta Millionaires Club. It takes what a Faye Webster record does best, unbending around the convergence of alt-country, indie rock, R&B and pop, and tranquilizes it even more through synthesizers, auto-tune and generous, winsome harmonies. Though it’s not packed with a classical ensemble, Webster and her band have never sounded so much like a clique of players coalescing with their instruments as if it’s their final, vibrant form. The results are warm, comfortable and gentle, and their muse is, simply, each other.

Webster was hesitant about calling it Underdressed at the Symphony because of those Car Therapy Sessions, as she and her brother Luke (who does all of her graphic design work) weren’t totally certain about how to disassociate the two projects visually. But her North Star was always “I’m underdressed at the symphony, crying to songs that you put me on.” “From the get-go, when I wrote ‘Underdressed at the Symphony,’ it sounded like such a title to me,” Webster says. “I was like, ‘Oh, this could be a book or a movie. It just feels like a title.’ And it was also, out of all the tracks there, the one that best represented the era of me making this record. [Luke and I] ended up just going for it.”

While the album title was, in part, influenced by Webster going to see the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra at the last minute and reveling in being someplace she didn’t feel like she fully belonged—and the line “it’s kinda nice to have familiarity, a sweet escape for whenever I need” evokes a spontaneity in “eBay Purchase History”—the correlation between the symphony and the album is more tangible in practice than in metaphor. It’s a sort-of break-up album that explores celebrity anxiety and sees Webster stepping just outside of the perspective. She just also happened to be frequenting the Woodruff Arts Center just north of Midtown. “When I think of Underdressed at the Symphony as a project and that time of my life, it really [reminds me], like, ‘Damn, I was really going to the symphony all the time,’” Webster says. “Or, even, symphonic music was really inspiring to me. I’ve always had strings on my records but, even now, just more and more have tried to incorporate it in my music. That era puts me in that mindset.”

On the album’s cover, a continuity between it and I Know I’m Funny haha (and Car Therapy Sessions) returns. Faye Webster is standing in a wardrobe, surrounded by blue garments on hangers and wearing a baggy white T-shirt. She’s holding a blue dress in her hand, leaving it up to the eyes of the beholder to determine whether she’s about to put that dress on or is about to hang it back up. When I Know I’m Funny haha came out, Webster said that cobalt blue was a color hue that spoke to her and made her happy, but not in a nostalgic, sensory way. “It’s still a color that makes me happy,” she says. “I just used to wear it all the time and incorporate it in my record. And I still do, obviously, with [Underdressed at the Symphony]. It’s so blue. Even the back of the record has an outfit that I wore on stage every day for a year on it, [as well as] my dress from the cover of Car Therapy Sessions. I feel like it was a nice ode to other things that were a big part of my life or projects that I’ve worked on. [Cobalt blue] makes me happy when I see it.”

To make Underdressed at the Symphony, she and her band decamped to Sonic Ranch, a five-studio hub built on a 1,700-acre pecan orchard on the border of the Rio Grande and Mexico in Tornillo, Texas. It’s the first record Webster’s made outside of Georgia, but the change of scenery was welcomed by everyone. “I didn’t want to switch anything else up, but I was willing to be like, ‘Oh, we could go to a new space and see how we work in that space together.’ So, I think that was really nice,” she says. “At Sonic Ranch, you’re so isolated. We were all living in the same house together, and you’d open the front door and the studio was, like, 50 feet away. It was just us. We never saw anybody. I never saw anybody but the band.”

The process for making Underdressed at the Symphony began just as every Faye Webster album does—with Webster making a demo sketch of about 33% of every track on the voice memo app on her iPhone. After sending them all to her engineers, Vandenberg and Annie Leeth, she takes them to the band to fill out—even if they’re only six seconds long, like the “But Not Kiss” demo was. “My demos are really raw,” she says. “I never take them to the computer, mostly because I’m not tech-savy. But, I’ll play those for the band and we’ll all listen to it together and, in that moment, be like ‘Pedal steel or not pedal steel?’ We’ll make decisions like that. Then we all just go to the room and sit down and start playing it again.”

Atlanta Millionaires Club, I Know I’m Funny haha and Car Therapy Sessions were all tracked live, and Underdressed at the Symphony is no different. Though a majority of the album came to life at Sonic Ranch, Webster kept up with her tradition of doing all of her vocals at home on GarageBand—because she’s “more comfortable around my stuff.” The result is a captivating collage of primitive, off-the-cuff genre-breaking ad-hoc and lush, whisper-light vocal melodies. “I feel like I really have the chance to be alone and in my comfort place, my safe space,” she says. “And I feel like you can really hear that from my vocals—or, at least, I can hear that through my vocals. I sound really comfortable and at peace.”

Webster and her band, on each song, do three takes max. Doing so lets the band revel in the granular details, and the subtleties of every line and every chord glow just an iota more—and it puts an even greater emphasis on what each musician drafts organically. “I feel like me and my band have been playing together for so long and we know each other really well and have a really great chemistry,” she says. “The reason we only do two or three takes is because I feel like the first impression is really important when it comes to stuff like that. I don’t like the band plotting on what they’re gonna play. When they play it, I’m like, ‘Oh, they played that for a reason.’”

On a song like “Lifetime,” the arrangements and the space they fill tell a story alongside Webster, especially Rosen’s piano-playing and Leeth’s violin—which work in tandem, and the spacial musicality converses with Webster’s phrasing in a real illuminating way. When you boil it down, what’s left in the pot is, more than anything else, a decade of trust, spontaneity and creative liberation. Faye Webster isn’t really a bandleader, even if it’s her name on the front of every record. When it comes to her and her ensemble, everyone is each other’s peer and no player’s efforts tower over anyone else’s.

“I never really tell people what to do. I think that’s the beauty of me and my band, we’re a family together. Everybody’s here for a reason,” Webster says. “Pistol has been playing pedal steel for me for 10 years for a reason. I’m not going to tell him what to do. I just love what he does. Every time something like [Nick’s piano-playing] happens, even through the first take of us playing it out, we’ll be like, ‘Oh, my gosh, that’s so cool.’ I’ll stop singing the words just to be like, ‘Oh, that’s hard. Keep doing it. That’s the one, for sure.’ Sometimes, we’ll go between three different pianos on one take, just because we’re like ‘Which one is it?’ And I feel like, when we hear it, it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s the one.’ And my band knows me really well. I feel like they know how to help represent what I’m going for—feeling or sonically.”

The only track from Underdressed at the Symphony that was recorded in the Peach State was “Lifetime,” done in Athens—where half of Webster’s band and her parents live. “It’s kind of really distracting,” she admits. “Sometimes I’ll find myself being like, ‘Okay, let’s wrap, because I want to go.’ [When we recorded ‘Lifetime’], my parents were in the studio staring at us, just hanging out with my brother. There were so many distractions—not in a bad way, there’s just always a lot going on when it’s our comfort zone. [Recording the album] at Sonic Ranch was a nice little switch-up for us.”

While Webster and her band remain a steadfast, speeding bullet towards perfection, they welcomed a guest into the fold on Underdressed at the Symphony: Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, who joined on “Wanna Quit All the Time” and “He Loves Me Yeah!” He and Wilco have been longtime influences on Webster (Cline plays the towering guitar solos on Webster’s favorite song of all time, “Impossible Germany”), and the song “Thinking About You” was almost named “Wilco-Type Beat.” “I was like, ‘This is a Wilco song,’” Webster admits. “We’ve had it on the setlist as ‘Wilco-Type Beat.’ I think it’ll forever be called that in my head. Having Nels on it was more meaningful to me than like, ‘Oh, I hear a guitar solo’—it was like, ‘This person in this band has meant a lot to me, and this would be so meaningful to me. I feel like it would help represent this era of my life.’”

While in 2023, Webster unveiled “But Not Kiss” and “Lifetime” as then-standalone-singles, Underdressed at the Symphony was officially ushered into the world via “Lego Ring”—which features Webster’s longtime friend Lil Yachty. The collaboration might have come as a surprise had Yachty not put out his psych-rock record Let’s Start Here last year, but the real epic component of the collaboration is that one of our most prominent rappers is on a song with pedal steel. “We’ve made a lot of songs together, and this one was just yet another thing I brought to the table for us,” Webster says Of all of the songs we’ve made, it’s always been his song—in a sense, something he brought to me. And this was the first time I ever brought something to him. It was my band, my song from scratch, and I think that resonated a little different. It was just another thing. I’ve been joking with him forever, like ‘You’re gonna sing on pedal steel.’”

All across Underdressed at the Symphony, Webster flirts with faint signifiers of rebirth—this idea that we can remake ourselves and it doesn’t have to be gaudy or remarkable beyond who we become for ourselves. Existence just is. The record is almost anti-romance, but Webster fully buys into the anxieties around fame. For every time she sings something balmy like “I want to see you in my dreams but then forget we’re meant to be but not yet,” she turns around and bemoans “it’s the attention that freaks me out” on “Wanna Quit All the Time.” On songs like “Tttttime” and “Thinking About You” and “Lifetime,” her lyricism is sparser than usual. Not counting the chorus, there are only eight lines on “Tttttime”; on “Lifetime,” all four verses end in repeated couplets, and she sings the outro line 14 times in a row, stretching the elastic of her own repetition.

Instead of taking inspiration from Atlanta Braves outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr., the Animal Crossing soundtrack and Rich Homie Quan, Webster turned inwards on herself when searching for relatability failed and she was forced to write her own canon from scratch—especially on “But Not Kiss.” “I was really looking for those emotions in other songs and I couldn’t find them—so I wrote it, because I couldn’t find anything that I felt expressed an anti-love song,” she says. “I was getting a lot of feelings out, because I wasn’t really finding outlets that I felt related to—or understood—how I felt. [‘But Not Kiss’], that was me doing it for myself. Sometimes I’ll hear songs and be like, ‘Damn, I wish I wrote that. I wish I had thought of that first.’ And then, sometimes, when I write, I’m like, ‘Oh, I did. I was the one that thought of that first.”

Webster has spoken in the past about how much she enjoys knowing that songs from I Know I’m Funny haha and Atlanta Millionaires Club couldn’t have existed on her earlier work—because of her evolution as an artist and her growth as a person. While she believes that the nostalgia of “Thinking About You” could have sat nicely somewhere on the haha tracklist, the song she’s certain couldn’t have come out until 2024, now that she’s 26 and five albums in, is “Lego Ring.” “I was listening to my favorite band in Atlanta, a punk band called Upchuck,” she says. “They influence me, but we’re also just good homies. That being my favorite band, and [the fact] I was listening to a lot of Turnstile, I wasn’t really listening to music like that while making haha.”

I Know I’m Funny haha blew up critically, landing on our year-end list in 2021—and, to go even further, her song “Better Distractions” wound up on Barack Obama’s favorite songs of 2020 list before the record was even out. Elton John interviewed her on his Rocket Hour radio show, and she has amassed over 7 million monthly listeners on Spotify—“Kingston” alone has racked up more than 190 million streams. While Paste has been riding with Webster since Atlanta Millionaires Club, it was I Know I’m Funny haha that really ballooned her towards the popularity she’s woven into now. It was an album that, through its charming tracklist and Webster’s obligations to fulfill cyclical press junkets and talk about it, opened the world’s eyes up to this mid-20s ex-youth tennis star who yo-yos, covers video game music at her shows (“Lake Verity” before and “Eterna City” now) and also happens to write some of the most idiosyncratic, nuanced music of this day and age.

On Underdressed at the Symphony, I can’t help but notice some serious parallels to Legend of Zelda scores, where the instrumentation really moves back and forth from the background to the foreground in really special, stirring ways. Like Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka’s storied franchise, there is a lush sense of world-building on Webster’s records, as her band fills empty spaces and she paints over heartbreak with a Fender Rhodes or lingering vocoder distortion. On a song like “Lifetime,” especially, the repetition of “in a lifetime” helps usher Rosen’s piano into and out of focus, as if it’s a character sharing sporadic scenes with Webster’s singing. But any comparisons one might draw between Webster’s music and that of any video game is purely a product of something intangible and subconscious. That’s how it goes with these exercises in meter and litany; rather than take the same route as her indie peers and overshare, Webster remains allergic to being verbose.

And, if you Webster her to assign her last three albums to specific starter Pokémon, she’ll tell you a story instead of being honest about which one is Squirtle. “At my symphony shows—we did two in Atlanta—somebody gave me a fancy Pikachu plushie,” she says. “It was Pikachu dressed in a suit, like he was going to the symphony. It’s one of my favorite plushies that I have, because I always see it and I’m always like, ‘Oh, that was from the orchestra shows and somebody gave me this fancy Pikachu.’” You might never know what Faye Webster’s dog’s name is—or what the hell went wrong with her last relationship—but, if you gift her a Pokémon plushie at a show, you might just get a shoutout in an interview or two. With Webster, it’s always just another thing. And sometimes, there’s music involved.

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Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.