South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Attention freaks out Webster
But her fan base keeps growing thanks to emotionally accessible music that walks indie rock-country line
Faye Webster was trying to get out. She had just performed the second of two shows at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta, swaying in a dark blue gown in front of a 20-piece string orchestra, her hands knitted over her diaphragm. All she wanted next was to go home. Those hometown concerts in 2022 felt like the crystallization of her career — a more significant milestone than when Barack Obama put her on his annual playlist or when she was asked to play Coachella this year. The lobby was clogged with fans, and Webster was focused on escape. Her mother had a hat, a cobalt blue ball cap with “haha” stamped across it, merchandise from Webster’s last album. She threw it on, tilted her head down and made it out the door.
Webster, 26, hates attention. This, she realizes, is inconvenient for any artist, much less an up-and-coming indie star with a new and fervid TikTok following.
Over two meandering video calls from Australia, where Webster was touring, she remained off camera for one of them. She mentioned a dog but only discussed its breed off the record. When she did slip into frame, she broke her sentences with long pauses, sometimes laughing at herself as she found the words.
“I have a lot of friends that do what
I do,” she said. “And I’m just like — I just don’t think I’m built for it. The attention really freaks me out.”
That attention has grown steadily since 2013, when Webster, then 16, self-released her debut album, “Run and Tell,” a folksy whirl of slide guitar and twang.
She grew up in Atlanta, where she still lives, listening to her mother play Alison Krauss records and bluegrass fiddle songs, an aesthetic she has incorporated into her own music. But she has also moved, solidly and smoothly, into a middle ground between indie rock and country — pedal steel mashed with bass, simmering drums beneath tropical synths — as she homes in on the banal brutalities of relationships.
On her recently released album, “Underdressed at the Symphony,” she traces the minutiae of piecing herself together after a breakup: She congratulates herself for eating before noon, scrolls through her eBay search history and reminds herself to call her mom.
Webster is reluctant to call it a breakup record. “I wish there was a better term for it,” she said after sighing.
The first song she wrote for the album, “But Not Kiss,” began with a 10-second voice memo she brought to the studio. She slowly unspools the line, “I want to sleep in your arms,” and then, after a pause, rushes out the words “But not kiss.” She had been searching for music that could speak to that feeling, what she calls “an anti-romantic love song.” When she couldn’t find it, she wrote it. “I was able to create this really off-balance, contradicting almost, meaningful thing,” she said.
The album’s title comes from a ritual she started in the months after her split. She would decide to see the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, a 15-minute drive from her house, moments before a performance was set to begin.
“It was therapeutic to me,” she said. “I was like, nobody knows me, I don’t know anybody here, they don’t care about me. I’m incognito, and I’m
listening to music I don’t know anything about.”
She perked up more talking about going to Cleveland for the World Yo-Yo Contest than at any point chatting about her music; she knows an array of tricks and even designed her own yo-yo. She played tennis competitively growing up and remains hooked on the sport. She and her brother bring rackets on tour and play on public courts. It’s what she thinks about when she’s trying not to cry onstage, she said.
There is a corner of TikTok devoted to watching Webster cry. There are grainy, zoomed-in videos of her head bowed before the mic, her voice breaking seconds into a song.
She doesn’t like going on TikTok, but the platform has glommed onto her — for reasons Webster, her bandmates and even her label don’t entirely understand.
Seemingly out of nowhere, “I Know You,” a track from her selftitled 2017 album, blew up about eight months ago, soundtracking shots of ice-skating dates and stern-faced teenagers staring into their mirrors.
Even as Webster releases new, starkly different singles — a hyperpop-adjacent song slathered in AutoTune, a collaboration with Lil Yachty, a friend from middle school — “people are discovering her back catalog,” said Drew Vandenberg, who has produced many of Webster’s albums. “She’s competing with herself.”
Vandenberg has known Webster since she showed up to record background vocals for her brother’s band while he was in college.
Webster’s early music predated the rise of acts like Clairo and Phoebe Bridgers, young women who Webster gets lumped in with “just because they’re women writing songs,” Vandenberg said. “It’s so belittling and weird and reductive.” Webster may be more closely aligned with Jeff Tweedy, with whom she has performed; one of the tracks from her new album was called, until recently, “Wilco Type Beat,” a reference to Tweedy’s band.
So much of Webster’s music centers on “a very vivid description of life,” Vandenberg said. “She’s just talking about her day-to-day, like, I’m going to the symphony, or I’m feeling great this morning, interjected with the inner monologue of what’s going on in her head. I think that the reason people connect with that is because it just feels like how they feel all the time — like, I’m at the dog park but, inside, I’m unbelievably sad.”
Part of the reason Webster is able to relay those inner thoughts so seamlessly is that she is at ease with her bandmates, many of whom she has worked with for years.
“Underdressed at the Symphony” is the first record the band did not record entirely in Athens, Georgia, where Webster’s parents live. She banged out most of the album in a 10-day stretch at Sonic Ranch, a complex in El Paso, Texas. Webster often bunkered in her room, even when her bandmates went to eat. They went on walks while she tried to finish writing or played horse on a basketball court. “It’s totally surreal — your only focus is music,” said Matt Stoessel, who plays pedal steel and guitar in the band.
That’s the environment Webster craves, where she can focus on the music and nothing else. In her hotel in Australia, she was wearing a shirt from her favorite band, the Atlanta punk rockers Upchuck. She plays bass for them some nights, mostly unplanned: She’ll spot a flyer for a show across town and call up them up. “That helps me be like, ‘OK, I get to play music, but nobody cares about me,’ ” she said and laughed. “That’s really fun for me.”