FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
Part Seventy-Three: Faye Webster
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ONE of the most interesting…
and influential young artists in music at the moment, Faye Webster is someone who will go on to inspire so many others. I feel she is one of the most distinct songwriters and voices around. I am keen to get to a few interviews. The twenty-four-year-old released one of this year’s best albums, I Know I'm Funny haha, back in June. Such a clever and original songwriter, this is what DIY said in their review:
“By way of a thesis summary, Faye Webster’s confession on ‘Both All The Time’ takes the cake; “I’m loneliest at night / after my shower beer.” Capturing the modern dating experience in 11 well-crafted vignettes, ‘Funny..’ is an album that tracks the life-cycle of an ill-fated romance, with all the glorious highs and lows - trying to impress their family, sharing your deepest secrets and then scrabbling to find ways to piece yourself back together when it all goes tits up. Despite its tumultuous subject matter, Faye hasn’t abandoned the melodic Hawaii-Five-O charm of her earlier work, infusing it with just the right amount of bite. ‘Cheers’ drapes slinky, skippering guitars over a steely frame, while ’Sometimes’ is a SoCal Frank Ocean lullaby, dissolving its woes in a glass full of blissful piano. The music acts as a balm for the lyrical headspace; on ‘A Stranger’ she finds herself deep in self-pity, comparing herself to exes past through swooning spoken-word, while ‘A Dream with a Baseball Player’ beds its lyrical double-meaning in a swinging hip-hop bassline: “How did I fall in love with someone / I don’t know?” Maybe the entire relationship was a fiction? It’s difficult to tell, but it hardly matters. Endearing and relatable without ever lapsing into total fondue, Faye Webster knows exactly how to roll with life’s punches, how to find the humour in a vulnerable moment. She knows she’s funny, but we think she’s pretty smart”.
It is worth knowing more about the Atlanta, Georgia-based artist. In terms of her sound, I guess you could label Webster’s music as ‘Indie’ or ‘Alternative’. Apologies if I repeat anything when sourcing from a few interviews. There is a lot to uncover and discover regarding Webster! The first interview that I want to bring in is from Passion of the Weiss. In it, we learn about Webster’s early work – and how she has developed as an artist since then:
“When Webster released her first album at 16, Run & Tell, her sound clearly paid homage to the twangy country of her youth. But as she grew more active in the arts scene in Atlanta, moonlighting as a hip-hop photographer (she shot Lil Yachty and Killer Mike among others), her aspirations shifted. After becoming friendly with Awful Records artists online and at shows, Webster signed a record deal with the left-of-center rap label known for their genre-defying vocal styles, sounds and aesthetics. Awful released her tightly-compact, self-titled LP in 2017, a precocious debut for a then-unknown 20-year-old. Shadowing Awful creatives allowed her the opportunity to observe and learn from some of Atlanta’s most experimental acts, including Father and Ethereal, whom Webster credits as major figures in her ascension.
This measured form of musical exploration gleaned from her time at Awful shined through on her 2019 Secretly Canadian debut, the swoon-worthy Atlanta Millionaires Club. The record reimagined the vintage folk of her youth in the form of dreamy, multi-instrumented soundscapes. The hazy, George Harrison-style guitar licks were still a fixture, but melancholic strings (“Jonny”) and somber brass sections (“Kingston”) gave the music more texture and depth.
You come from a family with deep musical roots, particularly in bluegrass and Americana. What are some of your earliest memories of music?
Faye Webster: I feel like the most influential early memories of music was just hearing my brother play guitar in the house. We had bedrooms that were sharing the same wall so I feel like I always heard him playing and I was like ‘I want to do that.
Your mother played the violin and your grandfather plays guitar as well. What did your family teach you about musicianship when you were getting started?
Faye Webster: I feel like the most influential early memories of music was just hearing my brother play guitar in the house. We had bedrooms that were sharing the same wall so I feel like I always heard him playing and I was like ‘I want to do that.
Your music style seems to carry on that familial folk and country feel to it, but also sounds modern with R&B and indie pop. How did that come about?
Faye Webster: I was always influenced by folk music especially like old country music because that’s what I grew up listening to. Being a young woman living in Atlanta I was slowly being influenced by other things, but I feel like I held on to this strong country root because that’s all I ever known. I think it just developed into my own thing.
PHOTO CREDIT: Pooneh Ghana
Your first album, Run & Tell, dropped when you were 16. How do you think your sound has evolved since then?
Faye Webster: A lot. I really don’t relate to that record anymore. Just like in an artist sense, I feel like everyone grows and changes. I think as I’ve grown I’ve realized who I wanted to be and what I wanted to write about and what was meaningful to me. As a 16 year old I didn’t know any of those things. I think I’ve just spent more time figuring myself out.
What was it like growing up in a Hip-Hop juggernaut of a city like Atlanta?
Faye Webster: It was sick. I wouldn’t have wanted to change any part of my childhood. I think it was so cool to be put on to different shit so early in my life which I’ve really appreciated. I feel like I’ve learned so much sitting back and just watching people. Being around them in general. I have a very passionate love for this city. Everyone’s creative and it’s so diverse.
Where did the album title I know Im Funny haha come from?
Faye Webster: It was a lyric and I was like ok I’m done. This was all it was meant to be. Then when it came to the time of naming it I was looking through lyrics. I wanted to play off lyrics and was looking for this long extended title that no one would think you would name a record. This one was just the obvious answer no matter how hard I tried to avoid it.
Is this a phrase you’ve set either to yourself or others a lot?
Faye Webster: No never. I feel like when I’m writing songs I’m not thinking about writing a song, I’m just singing my thoughts out loud. I feel like that verse was such a random thing I was thinking about”.
Growing up in such a musical city like Atlanta, it must have been eye-opening and hugely exciting for Faye Webster! One can hear the influence of the city in her work…though I feel her childhood tastes and musical upbringing is also important. When she spoke with i-D back in June, the influence of Georgia, then and now, was raised and explored:
“Faye grew up in Atlanta surrounded by music. Her influences were a mesh of the city’s thriving hip-hop scene and her parents’ preferences for country western music (her mom, from Texas, loved Elvis Presley). After she released her first album, she signed with Awful Records, an Atlanta-based label whose roster was made up mostly of rap and R&B artists. It was there she connected with Father, a rapper and the label’s founder who would later feature on the song “Flowers” off her breakthrough third album, Atlanta Millionaire’s Club.
The diversity and inclusivity of the music scene in Atlanta are essential elements of Faye’s songwriting style. “Everybody is doing something different, but at the same time, we all fuck with each other. We get inspired by each other, take roots from each other and then build our own things,” she says. “It’s cool. It doesn’t feel competitive. I don’t think I’ve really been able to find that anywhere else.”
She recorded I Know I’m Funny haha at a studio in the college town that is Athens, Georgia with producer Drew Vandenberg. Because of Covid, recording had to be planned well in advance and all at once, which is the opposite of how Faye is used to making music. “This time was way more stressful, and I didn’t last as long as I should have in the studio. I had this mental breakdown and then went home because I couldn’t do it,” she explains. “But it was a good learning experience for the future, when I’m not able to get my friends in the room the next day. I need to be prepared for an interruption.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Pooneh Ghana
Faye prefers the fresh feeling of a first take, of writing and recording one song at a time so she can fully immerse herself in it. “It’s not until I’m sitting in the studio, about to record, that I share the demo [with the band]. I don’t share demos ahead of time because I don’t want them thinking about it too much, like plotting or over-analysing. It’s a more accurate representation of what the song is supposed to be when it’s just like: this is what it’s calling for.”
Growing up, Faye made all her music on Garageband from the comfort of her bedroom at her parents’ house. Now, even though she loves the collaborative atmosphere of the studio, she still prefers recording vocals alone in her room. Her whisper-soft, crystal clear production is a signature part of her sound, as if she’s singing right into your ear. It makes every listen feel immediate and new, no matter how many times you’ve heard the song before.
Lyrically, Faye has a knack for nuance. She’s able to express what everybody else is thinking but nobody has said. “It’s like I’ve got this fuck-it mentality,” she says of her writing process. “I struggled with it in the past. I’d be texting my brother, like, ‘is mom going to be offended if I say this?’ But now, since I’ve gotten comfortable being honest, I find myself writing about different things because I just have this mindset of, whatever I’m thinking, I’m saying. I don’t want to sugarcoat it”.
When asked if she ever struggles to write lyrics, Faye says she had trouble with just one song on the album: “Overslept”. “I literally could not finish writing that song, and I think that’s why I decided to hand it off to somebody else.” Faye sent the song to mei ehara, a Japanese artist who she met online two years ago. “I was listening to Emerson Kitamura and I scrolled down to related artists, which I have legitimately never done before, and I found mei. Literally the first 30 seconds I was like, is this me? Did I just find my soulmate? I followed her, and she followed me back, and then we developed this friendship. She’s been so influential to me.”
“Overslept” is breezy and relaxing, the kind of song that makes you want to stop and stare at clouds while you sway to the beat. It’s got an effortless feel, particularly in Faye and mei’s harmonies, as if the two were meant to sing together. “I was thinking about Father on the last record, and how fitting it was for how important he was to me at the time,” Faye explains. “So I was trying to think, who would be the most representative of what I’ve been doing the past few years while making this record? And that’s when I decided I was going to ask mei”.
There are a few more interviews that I want to quote from before wrapping things up. Pitchfork’s interview goes into the humour ands smartness of Webster’s I Know I’m Funny haha. She revealed how she manages to balance a fun, normal life with that of an artist who is definitely rising to new heights:
“Webster’s new album, I Know I’m Funny haha, which pairs her understated, often hilarious songwriting with her distinctive combination of pedal steel-soaked indie-pop, classic country, bittersweet R&B, and nimble lounge music. In her lyrics, Webster explores the subtle anxieties of a new relationship—when one partner falls asleep before the other, when one of their siblings forgets your name—and offers an acute window into her personal life. “There’s a very fine line,” she tells me the day after the show. “With my music, I want people who don’t know me to know every possible thing about how I feel.” She pauses. “But I also want privacy.”
As she navigates the awkwardness of indie stardom, Webster has found a delicate balance between savoring her life as a regular, fun-loving person—she gets particularly excited when talking about playing Animal Crossing: “This shit is fire! It’s fun to be a kid!”—and her more intense evolution as one of the most promising young songwriters working. For all her punchlines and casual asides, Webster’s stage presence is no joke. With her four-piece band’s tight, slow-motion grooves, she sings pitch-perfect, eyes closed in deep concentration, seeming more like a seasoned bandleader than a Gen Z homebody who would otherwise be yo-yoing and watching baseball.
“I’ve always been really chill,” she says, and indeed, during our conversation, her mood is proudly laid-back—giggling and riffing, suddenly slipping into a British accent or making sarcastic, meditative hand gestures as she delivers a particularly koan-like sentiment. “Something I talk to my therapist about is my fear of people not liking me,” she confesses. “And my therapist is like, ‘Well, what if they don’t like your music?’ But I don’t give a fuck! I’m so confident in my music because this is what I like to do. It’s all I know how to do, really. So if you don’t like it, I don’t care—because I do!”.
I was not even aware that Webster spent time in Nashville. In terms of its influence, it is a city that is not only home to some of the best Country artists. There is some great Pop and other sounds coming from the Tennessee city. FADER chatted with Webster in June. They ask about Nashville. They were also curious about how her new album differs from her previous release, Atlanta Millionaire's Club:
“Do you think you would have stayed in Nashville? Do you think there's an alternate universe where you stayed and tried to make it in the Nashville songwriting machine?
Probably not. Maybe if I went earlier at a younger age where I didn't really know what I wanted, I feel like it would have been possible. But I feel like as a young adult, it was kind of like I'm finding myself, I'm finding my sound and who I want to be, who I'm happy with, and I don't think I would have ever stayed.
So you've expressed this sentiment of the stuff you got out of, I guess, working with Awful and stuff like that was this sense of community and I wonder how you hold onto something like that as your music becomes more successful and as you step into playing much biggest shows, working with much bigger labels, that kind of thing?
Yeah. I feel like it was such a beautiful learning experience for me just to be a part of a group that was just so close and it wasn't always about music. It felt like family first and then we'll do music together. But it was nice because I had really never worked on music with other people before. It was a new concept to me and I wasn't really comfortable doing it and I feel like just being around musicians every day in Atlanta, I really just opened a new door for me. But definitely overall, always thankful forever for that group.
PHOTO CREDIT: HIGHSNOBIETY/Bryan Luna
Do you think you still make music in that way that you developed while you were making music with all those people?
Yeah, for sure. I feel like doing collabs or just always working with somebody else is important just because nobody's brain works the same way. So it's nice to, I guess, almost subconsciously learn from making music or doing what this other person also does that you do and just getting a different mindset of it and a different approach. And I feel like it was influential in ways that I will never know and can never explain, but will keep doing somehow.
So this album is on an emotional level, it's quite different from Atlanta Millionaire's Club. That record was a little, maybe lonely or something. This one focuses on this different set of trials, navigating the early parts of a relationship. At what point during the writing and recording did you step back and realize like, "Oh, this is the kind of record that I've made."
Yeah. It really wasn't till the end. I feel like when I'm recording, it's not like I'm making a record. It's okay here's songs that I wrote and I'm tracking them and eventually it'll be a whole. But it's not really till it's all done and you're looking at it as a group, hearing it as a group where I was like, "Dang, I'm mentally stable and happy now." And it really was just a more hopeful project from what I feel I was making in the past.
Yeah. So I love this track, "A Dream With A Baseball Player," which is about having a crush on a baseball player. And I'm interested how important is fantasy to your music or to your songwriting process?
I feel like not that important just because with my song writing, I've always been the type of person who has to write about personal experience. I know people who can read a book and just write a song about this book or some made up and I'm just like, I've never been able to do that. So I don't know. I feel like that song is very dreamlike and it is me living in a fantasy, but it's a personal fantasy that I had at the time. You know what I mean? It's still a very personal experience.
And I guess on the topic of baseball, when I read about you, I feel like there's always a mention of games. There's yo-yo, chess, Nintendo Switch, going to the batting cages, stuff like that. I was wondering, what do you love about games? All these various different kinds of games? What do you thinks led you to being, for lack of a better word, a hobbyist in this way?
I don't know. I just like feeling like a kid sometimes. Like dude, I feel like everything in life is taken so seriously that it makes games and just fun pastimes extra fun, literally fun. I don't know. It just makes me happy”.
I am going to finish with an interview from The Line of Best Fit. I feel there is more optimism and light on I Know I’m Funny haha than Faye Webster’s previous work. Whilst a sense of loneliness has not gone, it seems less common. She was asked about solitude and how she spent her lockdown. The Line of Best Fit also bring up how critics have been eager to label and easily categorise the work of an artist whose material is so rich and without boundaries:
“Webster cites two clear influences on I Know I’m Funny haha. “I was listening to Hannah Cohen a lot,” she says. “She put out a record a while ago called Welcome Home and it’s become one of my favourite records of all time.” After discovering the Japanese artist Mei Ehara after trawling the related artists on Spotify for the first time, Webster became obsessed with her. “After listening to her for just 30 seconds I was like, ‘is this me?’ I even played her to my band in the tour van to make sure! I just fell in love with her instantly. (I listened to Ehara after the interview and she and Webster are indeed rather similar, their music both being built upon pillowy melodies and dulcet singing).” Ehara features on “Overslept” and the origins of the collaboration were endearingly innocent. “I followed her and then she followed me back,” Webster explains, visibly overjoyed by the memory. “We started messaging, emailing, basically being penpals. I decided to ask her to be on the record because she was so influential and she said yes right away.”
This is the thing: in the past it’s been almost comical to watch critics try and harang Webster into one genre. She’s been called an alt-country artist; she’s been noted as making R&B for homebodies; she’s even been lumped into hip-hop, presumably solely because Father was featured on Atlanta Millionaires Club. Her sound is really a distillation of all of these things and more, an artist both of Atlanta and not, who truly belongs after the obsolescence of strict genre categories. It’s impossible to restrict an album that contains the lithe pop flair of Ehara, the hip-hop influence of her Atlantan friends, and the swishing flourishes of country that come from a youth spent listening to her parents play country constantly in the house and car - her mum is from Texas and her dad is a bluegrass guitar player.
As this is a Faye Webster record, solitude is never fully gone. “There’s a difference between lonely and lonesome / But I’m both all the time,” she sighs in “Both All The Time”. Coming from the girl who told herself repeatedly “I should get out more” in Atlanta Millionaires Club’s “Room Temperature”, it feels like the timid acknowledgement that, perhaps, Webster will always be trapped within her introverted shell. What’s the difference between lonely and lonesome? “I think that ‘lonely’ is like, ‘dang, I don’t want to be alone right now, I want to be with somebody’, but ‘lonesome’ is when you just have no option. ‘Lonesome’ is when you feel alone forever and you can’t change it.” Indeed for the homebody Webster, nothing really changed during quarantine. “I feel like last year was easy for me, thankfully, because that’s what I’m like when I’m not touring anyway. I’m usually here (laughs while gesturing behind her). I guess I just enjoy being home and being in a safe space.”
It’s why one of her most passionate hobbies is the solo pastime of yo-yoing. She whiled away the empty hours of quarantine with her newfound love of yo-yoing, which started when she received a yo-yo in her Christmas stocking a couple of years ago. “I took the yo-yo on tour and went on social media looking for other yo-yo players and found the craziest community I’ve ever seen,” she says. “From there, I would link up with players on tour as we travelled to different cities. The more competitions I went to, the more people I met, I thought it was so sick. The community is so cool.” She might have had plenty of time for practice last year but it didn’t lead to any improvement. “It got pretty hard because my yo-yo friends would send me private YouTube links with videos of them trying to teach me something but it just wasn’t the same as being there with them! I need to see a yo-yo friend asap”.
I am going to finish off there. I will end with a playlist containing Webster’s best tracks. I feel, even with a number of albums under her belt, the best work is still ahead of her. A stunning modern artist who can go on and be a legend, make sure that you check out the music of the incredible artist. On I Know I'm Funny haha, Faye Webster has proven she is one of…
OUR very finest artists.