Faye Webster Crushes on Ronald Acuña Jr. in “A Dream with a Baseball Player”

Ahead of her new record I Know I’m Funny haha, Atlanta singer/songwriter Faye Webster has shared a third and final single before the album arrives this Friday, June 25, via Secretly Canadian. “A Dream with a Baseball Player,” inspired by her hometown MLB team’s star player, Ronald Acuña Jr., is out now alongside a music video. Meanwhile, Webster has expanded her upcoming headlining tour, adding North American shows set for February and March of 2022.

“A Dream with a Baseball Player” finds Webster stuck on both Acuña and the nature of that infatuation: “How did I fall in love with someone / I don’t know?” she wonders again and again. Her murmurs are backed by slinky throwback R&B instrumentation, including spare but purposeful low end and saxophone accents, and her vocals are smoothly layered in all the right places. Webster brings genuine emotion to the track, but also deadpan humor: “There’s so much going on / My grandmother’s dead / And I can’t sleep ‘cause this isn’t my bed / He doesn’t even know those things exist,” she sings, poking fun at the absurdity of her affection for a total stranger, yet refusing to minimize or dismiss it at the same time.

Webster says of her new single (and her favorite Brave) in a statement:

A song about Ronald Acuña Jr., obviously. Off tour I spent so much of my time watching baseball that I thought I wanted to be a baseball player. But I’m not, so I guess the next best thing was having a crush on one. I guess this song explains what having a crush feels like. Having made up conversations with them in your head even though you don’t speak their language, wearing their team jersey every day, things that make you feel closer to this person that you don’t know at all. But I sang at the Braves game, and they let us meet so I think I got that one out of my system.

“A Dream with a Baseball Player” follows I Know I’m Funny haha’s opener “Better Distractions,” released in 2020, as well as its title track and “Cheers,” which Paste just ranked among the year’s best songs so far. Webster’s new record is one of our most-anticipated of the month, which is saying something, given how stacked June 25 alone is.