Faye Webster Waltzes With Time on Underdressed at the Symphony

A Faye Webster live show often includes a yo-yo performance interlude and a cover of the Pokemon theme song. On stage, she’s dressed in a cobalt blue jumpsuit, a tennis visor and some sneakers. Guitar in hand, there is this ridiculous-yet-comforting quality about her, like a well-worn gag T-shirt. She’s like someone you’re assigned to work with on a group project. You have little in common, yet you talk with ease; the conversation is familiar and playful, but not without meaning. So, when she mentions she’s in a band, you go to see her show.

Unlike other “indie darlings,” Webster’s kitsch is sincere. It doesn’t provoke an inward wince; it cushions itself with irony so you never doubt its integrity. She’ll joke around and blow up a balloon animal, but in the next moment will stab it with a pin, deflating herself in front of you. On “A Dream With A Baseball Player” from 2021’s I Know I’m Funny haha, she jokes about how she fell in love with Atlanta Braves star outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr., but then admits: “That’s kind of sad, don’t you think? I think so.” On “Johnny,” from 2019’s Atlanta Millionaire’s Club, she asks the eponymous man if he loved her, asking him to help her “figure it out, not that [she] paid attention.”

Webster’s lyrics are like the underlined sentences of a novel—the lines glow from the page, compelling you to frantically dig into your purse to find a pen. They’re quick admissions superimposed with laughter and weeping—which sometimes sound the same, don’t you think? But she doesn’t blatantly spell anything out; you learn bits and bobs about her, but nothing so fully finger-pointing. This vagary invites self-purportion, presenting an outline of feeling that needs coloring in. Recently, TikTok users have started grabbing their crayons. Just in the last year, Webster’s streams have gone up 1,100% due to the popularity of her songs on TikTok. Webster accidentally, but beneficially, writes algorithmically. Those underlined sentences speak in the same tone as most Gen-Z’s—at 26, Webster is one herself—and are often short, one or two-liners that naturally work themselves into the virtual format.

On the title track from her fifth album Underdressed at the Symphony, Webster sings, “At least going broke will help me heal from something,” and I can already see the fit-check videos now. “I’m wearing new clothes / I’m not the silhouette you know,” she continues. Not only could these lyrics apply to fit-check videos, but glow-ups after break-ups or general thrift hauls: the possibilities are endless here because, as usual, Underdressed at the Symphony serves accessible aphorisms spangled with sarcasm and heartbreak.

While Webster’s albums retain a consistent tone, they do so, too, in sound. Hailing from Atlanta, she serves up a sweet contextual swirl of her geography with country, indie and a hint of R&B. She then tops it with whatever sonic crumbles she’s into right now. Newer additions on Underdressed at the Symphony are the occasional sprinklings of vocoder and drops of strings, which, because of the title, you might expect more than what is actually delivered.

Because all of the songs on Underdressed at the Symphony were recorded in a live room, they have this open, cavernous sound—with Webster’s vocals like dew drops falling at the entrance: Come inside, hangout, take it all in, she beckons in her confident but delicate timbre. On opening track “Thinking About You,” Webster wakes up as bass flows down a lazy river. Piano radiates light, and a Glockenspiel twinkles somewhere offshore. “I’m thinking about you,” she sings over and over, and for probably just a little too long. These wide expanses are vital to the Faye Webster sound; they’re reliable like the expected crashing of waves, dropping at the same frequency in the same whoosh. But even the sounds of the ocean can get monotonous. Like the lead track, “Lifetime,” while gorgeous and sweeping with plucked violin and melancholic percussion, also meanders a bit too much and ends up losing its emphasis and whooshes by.

Yet, the open spaces are fitting, and do work most of the time. Throughout the album, Webster often sings from some hypnagogic cloud existing between both reality and daydreams. On “Wanna Quit All The Time,” a pedal steel pans to one side, acting as the dreamy right brain. Webster’s voice is the left brain, as she analyzes her position: “I used to be self conscious / Well, really, I still am,” she admits. “I’m just better at figuring out why.” You can imagine Webster with an elbow on the kitchen table, her cheek in her palm as she dazes trying to decide what to do. No worries, she assures: “I think I’ll figure it out,” with the “it” seemingly being life, and every decision she will have to make within it.

On “Tttttime,” that pedal steel remains to the side as strings and percussion take center stage. The track maintains the album’s repeated vastness, not dissimilar to time itself. Although Webster knows she’ll get “bored in an hour,” she accepts this. Unlike “Better Distractions” from I Know I’m Funny haha, where she’s similarly bored and alone, back then, she “didn’t know what to do.” This time around, though, she’s still alone but shrugging it off: “What’s new,” she sings nonchalantly. “I got t-t-t-time,” she sputters in tandem with the bow movement of the strings and clinking of the flute—all together sounding like a clock ticking. Now, she’s in control. She’s familiar with the uncomfortable. In fact, she’s reveling in it.

“eBay Purchase History” expectantly yields Webster’s quintessential lyricism. Her eBay purchase history could “tell you a lot about her,” she admits both sardonically and sheepishly, like a shrug of shoulders. Welp. However, she chooses not to let us in, preferring to “keep [her] anonymity hid,” admitting playfully that she “just learned that word, thought that [she’d] use it.” Like “eBay Purchase History,” the auto-tuned “Feeling Good Today” acts as a sort of happy interlude—both lack a chorus—between the more cerebral moments as she simply sings over R&B guitar about what she did with her day. Again, you sense she’s less lost within her heartbreak, but decidedly wallowing in the comfort of being able to experience and live through it. She enjoys the peaks, accepts the valleys, and dawdles warmly in the flatlands.

On Underdressed at the Symphony, and most Faye Webster albums for that matter, most of the tracks are mid-tempo. “Lego Ring” and “He Loves Me Yeah!” however, are significant outliers. “Lego Ring,” featuring Webster’s middle school friend Lil Yachty, continues the lightheartedness—I mean, it’s a song about wanting a literal Lego ring—but incorporates heavier drums and a faster, head-bopping rhythm while still snaking into a cloudy vastness during the harmonized chorus: “I know what I like / I know what I want / But you know I kinda need.” The anthemic “He Loves Me Yeah!” incorporates fuzzier guitar strums, seesawing like the stressed second thump of a fluttering heartbeat—the one that confirms what the thudding is all about. Drums keep the pace as Webster sings contentedly. Her and her “baby” “drink water straight out the tap.” He owes her money but she lets “it pass.” The song is silly, but Webster finds triumph in the mundane, like a honeymoon stage where every small act feels like an extreme expression of love. Obviously they’re perfect, he “pumps [her] gas so that [she] doesn’t get out.”

While the album doesn’t really deviate from the greater Faye Webster discography, the album cover seems to suggest Webster has changed: Now, she’s hanging up her cobalt blue jumpsuit. On the title track, when she mentions she’s “underdressed at the symphony,” an orchestra crescendos, swirling up quickly but then dispersing just as fast—it’s just a measure of change. The whole album is like this, and perhaps that is fitting to her experience. As if experimenting with low-waisted jeans, she’s showing just a little more skin, and proving how it’s gotten thicker.

It’s like the chorus on “But Not Kiss.” At the start of the track, Faye Webster is indecisive, saying she wants to sleep in her lover’s arm but “not kiss,” over a slow ballad track. Suddenly, the drums roll and the full band backs her: Yeah, Yeah, she sings, as if nodding to herself. Arms crossed, she’s affirming her stance. She might want to “see you in [her] dreams,” but then she immediately wants “to forget” that dream. Yeah, Yeah. This is what I mean. This is where I am. This is what I need. So, maybe Webster isn’t even hanging up her blue jumpsuit on the cover—maybe she’s just waltzing with it, or about to put it on. She’s embracing herself, her heartbreak, her sarcasm and taking time to dance, slowly, with her feelings. Yeah, Yeah.

Sam Small is a freelance writer of sorts & shorts based in Brooklyn, NY. She has written for NME, Consequence of Sound, Clash Magazine and Under The Radar.