Faye Webster Is a Low-Key Superstar. Funny How That Happened
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Faye Webster is kicking my ass at tennis. We’re at the Altadena Town & Country Club in L.A. on a late-January afternoon, playing a very loose set amid pouring rain. One of us is really good; the other (me) has never picked up a racket in her life. But even though I’m pathetically outmatched, Webster is being really sweet about it, cheering from her side of the court whenever I manage to make contact with the heavy, soaking-wet ball (which is almost never).
Our redheaded, bearded coach Nate is equally supportive, instructing us by using phrases like “strike zone” and “ready position.” They’re foreign to me, but not to my opponent, who eagerly nods along in an oversize white T-shirt and black shorts, her auburn hair tied back with bangs scattered across her forehead. Later, when we retrieve balls with the pick-up hopper, the contraption reminds her of a recent memory. “My mom” — she stops herself with a laugh, then corrects herself — “Santa got me one of those for Christmas.” She giggles at her mistake. “Oops!”
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No one recognizes Webster during the day we spend together in Los Angeles, a stopover just before the Atlanta native heads to Australia for a tour. That sort of anonymity isn’t likely to last that much longer. “Lego Ring,” the fuzzy, borderline psychedelic rocker she released with longtime pal Lil Yachty in January, has racked up more than 4 million streams. She has a colossal new following on TikTok — ironic, considering she does not have a TikTok — where clips of her shows receive millions of views and comments like “Our mother is mothering.” And with her new album, Underdressed at the Symphony, and massive headlining tour, she’s headed from cult fandom to a bigger spotlight.
Listeners and journalists alike struggle to categorize Webster’s no-fucks-given blend of indie pop, R&B stoner jams, and wistful folk. “She’s one of the rare people who has regenerated her own genre,” says Jeff Tweedy, who invited Webster to open for Wilco in 2021. “Is it coming at country music from a weird angle, or is it coming at soul music from a weird angle? She’s using instrumentation and elements that don’t traditionally relate to each other, [but] it all fits together for her. She doesn’t seem to get that there are divisions she’s crossing. There’s no contrivance as to where she’s drawing influences from — it’s just literally what she likes.”
Right now, though, Webster is focused on her serve. Most fans aren’t aware Webster played tennis as a kid; if sports do come up, it usually involves her obsession with the Atlanta Braves, or her custom-made yo-yos (she’s really good at yo-yoing, too). But it turns out she was an 18-and-under tennis champion. When I mention this, she’s shocked I’ve discovered her secret. “Wow,” she says. “That’s crazy. That’s, like, a Nardwuar fact.”
Standing on the court, Webster holds a gift from Nate: a racket custom-made by Naomi Osaka that matches Webster’s Nikes, also designed by the tennis star (the shoes feature Osaka’s favorite snacks). She recently bought Osaka’s new biography, which details her life in the spotlight and her mental-health struggles.
For Webster, Osaka is more than just an athlete she admires. She’s someone she can relate to, especially as she faces the pressures of fame (it doesn’t hurt that the Obamas have praised both women, with Michelle describing Osaka as “sensational” and Barack including Webster’s “Better Distractions” on his favorite songs of 2020).
“She also struggles with attention, and it’s inspiring to see how she deals with it,” Webster says. “I’ll cry onstage sometimes if it’s just really overwhelming, or sometimes I’ll be really sad and have bad days and just tell the crowd that upfront. Seeing her be vulnerable has helped me be vulnerable.”
WEBSTER IS FUNNY. While some may mistakenly pigeonhole her into the “sad girl” genre, there’s always an underlying current of humor. Even when she’s singing about crying (which is often), it’s impossible for her not to add a whimsical twist. On 2019’s Atlanta Millionaires Club, where on one track she admits she’s cried so much that her tears “have gone room temperature,” the song’s video shows otherwise, with Webster engaging in happy activities like hula dancing and synchronized swimming. Symphony is no different, the most lighthearted moments being “eBay Purchase History,” a song about — you guessed it — Webster’s eBay purchase history.
One thing Webster doesn’t particularly love is classic rock. When I ask her about the Beatles, she says “I don’t care,” but she has a stronger opinion about a certain fellow from Minnesota. “I hate Bob Dylan,” she says. “I just never got into it, can’t stand him.” Her management company, Look Out Kid, is named after a Dylan lyric. “They found out I didn’t like him after they signed me!”
But Webster is a die-hard Wilco fan, citing their set list staple “Impossible Germany” as her favorite song of all time. She recruited Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, who plays that song’s cosmically awesome solo, for a couple of Symphony tracks. “On the first date that Faye [opened for] us, Jeff and I were side stage, and I was completely blown away by her aesthetic,” Cline says. “I wasn’t expecting it. I was so charmed by it. You could really cruise in a lowrider car to her music. It’s smooth without being annoyingly smooth. And Jeff whispered in my ear, ‘A lot of her lyrics are really amusing,’ so I started paying more attention. And he was right.”
Another thing Webster is a die-hard fan of: pedal steel guitar. The instrument has become her trademark, its melted twang supporting her ultra-tender vocals. For this you can thank Matt “Pistol” Stoessel, her longtime guitarist. Webster describes their relationship as “symbiotic,” and when I phone Stoessel, it’s immediately clear he’s her extremely chill musical counterpart. It’s no surprise that Stoessel is a Deadhead who cites Jerry Garcia as his biggest inspiration. Webster tends to emphasize the music over vocals, grooving with her band and stretching tracks out for minutes at a time. “It’s the jam-band quality without the noodling,” says Stoessel. Case in point: Underdressed at the Symphony kicks off with “Thinking About You,” a blissed-out journey through Webster’s mind that stretches on for nearly seven minutes (naturally, the song was originally titled “Wilco Type Beat”).
After our tennis match, Webster and I get lunch at Lunasia, a dim sum restaurant in Pasadena. She sits across from me, sipping on chrysanthemum tea and scrolling the menu on her cellphone. She’s allergic to pineapple, so she double-checks her selections — stir-fried cucumber and barbecue chicken dumplings — before ordering.
Webster’s phone says a lot about her. A baseball card of Ronald Acuña Jr., a star outfielder for the Braves, is tucked into the back of its transparent case (she chronicled her crush in 2021’s “A Dream With a Baseball Player”). Her screen’s background is a sepia-toned illustration of skeletons from the fantasy game Warhammer. And dangling from her device are three miniature classic Pokémon: Pikachu, Ditto, and Poliwag. (She used to have Pokémon cards listed on her tour rider, but received so many she had to switch to V-Bucks, the Fortnite currency.)
At my request, Webster opens an app to show me her actual eBay purchase history. It’s a chaotic collection of toys (her words), including vintage figurines of Nerdlucks (Michael Jordan’s enemies in Space Jam, a.k.a. the Monstars), a giant Despicable Me Minion, and Scannerz, a bizarre handheld device that lets you scan bar codes. Most twentysomethings spend their days on social media, but Webster prefers to bid on the cultural artifacts of her childhood. Suddenly, she points to a recent sale and melts as if she’s showing me a newborn puppy. “Oh, my gosh!” she says. “I got this really cute Wallace & Gromit letter holder!”
WEBSTER MAY BE fixated with cartoon ephemera, but Underdressed at the Symphony is a strikingly sincere record, one that chronicles a painful breakup. Webster wrote it following her split from the rapper Boothlord, her boyfriend of four years. “It didn’t happen just once,” she says of the breakup. “It was such a long process that it took that long to cope with, to get strong enough to be like, ‘This isn’t good for me.’ ”
She cites the intimate “But Not Kiss” (“I want to see you in my dreams but then forget/We’re meant to be but not yet”) as an “anti-romantic” love song. “I remember writing it and being like, ‘I wish this song was written for me. I wish I didn’t have to write it,’ ” she says. “I couldn’t find what I was looking for, so I said it myself.”
On the title track, she confronts her anguish over the breakup head-on (“I know you haven’t told your mother yet/’Cause she invited me over again”), mulling heartache over slow-burning instrumentation that includes a snippet of an actual symphony. If that wasn’t literal enough, she spells it out in a later verse: “I’m underdressed at the symphony/Crying to songs/That you put me on.”
Webster actually did this, frequenting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra as a way to heal from the breakup. It became a compulsion, deciding to attend at the last minute and feeling a rush of euphoria as she drove the 15 minutes from her house, worrying she wouldn’t have time to park. Naturally, she never gave herself enough time to dress appropriately.
Alone yet surrounded by the crowd, she felt at ease. Each trip was a different experience: the night she watched a 21-year-old play Beethoven; that Christmas show where she wore a fleece vest while everyone else wore formal attire. “I found it therapeutic,” she says. “Nobody knows me, I don’t know anybody. I don’t know what I’m listening to half the time. When I was really going through a hard time, I was like, ‘Oh, is there a show tonight?’ ”
Webster recorded Symphony at Sonic Ranch Studios in Tornillo, Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border. It marked the first time Webster recorded outside of her home state, a noteworthy break from her usual if-it-ain’t-broke, don’t-fix-it mentality. “My engineer [Drew Vandenberg] was like, ‘Want to try something new?’ And I was like, ‘Not really,’ ” she says with a laugh.
The band cut the album over nine days, recording live in the room, often doing just three takes of a song and choosing the best one. “Every song has a repeating riff, there’s not really any solos,” says -Stoessel. “Once we find the bed of the song, what we started calling ‘the ride,’ then it’s ready.”
Cline recorded his parts remotely from his home in upstate New York, while Webster cut her vocals on GarageBand in her kitchen back in Atlanta. It’s her preferred method of recording her voice, which isn’t surprising for a self-described homebody. When I ask her what her perfect day looks like, she simply says “Being at home.” She loves to play her Nintendo devices, like the Switch and DS (the latter in cobalt blue, her favorite color), and her new iPad mini (she jokes that she even uses it with the Apple Pencil). All things considered, it’s kind of surprising she’s not a stoner.
“I’m so sober,” she says, though she does have the occasional glass of wine. “Yachty posted a video of me and Tyler [the Creator], and there’s just millions of comments that say ‘She’s so stoned.’ They didn’t even care that the three of us were in a room together. They were just like, ‘She’s high out of her mind!’ I’m like, ‘I was just smiling! I’m not a smoker!’ ”
THERE ARE MUSICAL roots in Webster’s family. Her grandfather was a bluegrass guitarist; her oldest brother, Jack, inspired her to pick up the guitar, while her other brother, Luke, works on all of her graphic design. She met Yachty at Inman Middle School in Atlanta. “It was in eighth grade in the cafeteria, at an open house before the semester started,” the rapper tells Rolling Stone. “I was introduced to her by a mutual friend, and we’ve been friends ever since.” Later, when Webster began photographing rappers around Atlanta, Yachty was one of her first subjects.
Webster self-released her first album, Run and Tell, when she was 16. She never questioned pursuing music full time; it hadn’t occurred to her to do anything else. “When everyone was graduating high school and starting [their] lives, I was like, ‘Oh, this is all I’ve done, so how do I do that?’ ” she recalls.
She moved to Nashville to study songwriting at Belmont University, but was so homesick she’d drive back to Atlanta most weekends. Back home, she’d hang out with her friends in the hip-hop collective Awful, which coalesced around a label of the same name. She began to feel like school was a waste of time. After moving back home, she signed with Awful in 2017 and dropped her self-titled second album. “I’ve never been a part of such a close collective,” she says. “It wasn’t just music — it was a sense of family. It was almost like music was last.”
When Webster and I spoke in 2019, she said being a white woman on a hip-hop label made her feel like an outlier. When I mention it now, she shrugs. “I definitely feel like that was a thing people talked about,” she says. Yachty has a different take: “I didn’t find it weird, because this is Atlanta. The hipster scene meshed pretty hard, because Atlanta is so small. It plays a part in every artist’s music who originates from the city.”
Webster is often recognized in Atlanta, but she says it doesn’t bother her. It’s everything else about fame she finds overwhelming, like how she comes off in interviews or how many of them she does. “I avoid thinking about it,” she says. “I’m not built for it. It freaks me out.”
Without even realizing it, Webster is quoting the new Symphony track “Wanna Quit All the Time,” where she sings, “I wanna quit all the time/I think about it all the time/It’s the attention that freaks me out.” Across all five albums, in a catalog of autobiographical songs, it stands out as the most honest and most vulnerable moment in her career.
Webster’s fame started to increase following 2021’s I Know I’m Funny Haha, when some of her older songs began to go viral on TikTok, like “I Know You” and “Kingston.” There are clips of her lyrics featuring her sped-up vocals that have received millions of views; in one TikTok, a fan is sobbing uncontrollably during her set. Last fall, when Cline joined her onstage for “In a Good Way” in Chicago, he realized how much her audience had grown. “Opening for Wilco, a lot of people probably dug her, and she’s only playing for half an hour,” Cline says. “Two years later, a whole other thing has happened. I didn’t really do a demographic survey that night, but it was mostly all these screaming young women.”
“I’ve always thought it’s really important that people see me as a regular guy,” Webster says. “I think a lot of the anxiety and the tension I feel is because I am a regular guy, and when people idolize me, it makes me uncomfortable, because I don’t even idolize myself. I’m glad people can relate to me. What they relate to the most are my lyrics, and I’m like, ‘I’m sure you have some thoughts that I would love to hear, too. I’m sure there’s some stuff you’re thinking that is just as genius.’ You know what I mean?”
“Faye and I have talked about this so many times,” Yachty says. “I think she does a pretty good job of maintaining her freedom. There’s only so much you can do. It’s the unfortunate reality of this career. The bigger you get, the more successful, but the farther away you are from a normal, private life.”
For Underdressed at the Symphony, Webster has incorporated a few things to help minimize her anxiety: limiting press, keeping a strict no-camera rule on Zoom, and maintaining a safe distance from social media. She’s also getting better at saying no. “My manager tells me that my whole career is that I just want to make cool stuff,” she says. “Which can be frustrating for them. I’ll pass on something that he doesn’t want me to pass on, but then I’m like, ‘Oh, but I’ll go photograph [myself] playing a yo-yo for the whole day. Easy!’ ”
“She’s out of step with the conversation, and I relate to that,” says Tweedy. “There’s certain things that are just not worth it. A lot of management and record companies and people in that world don’t want to leave money on the table. And [Wilco’s] decision-making, since the very beginning, was based on, ‘What allows me to do this for the longest period of time?’ Those decisions tend to run counter to driving yourself into the ground to just make sure you get every penny that’s available to you at that moment. It can be frustrating for business people, but I think she’ll come to those same conclusions.”
Until then, Webster will continue to play tennis, finding local courts on tour. A couple of weeks after our hang, we have a last chat over Zoom (camera off, of course). She’s calling from Melbourne, where she’s about to tour through early February. She already went to see the women’s final of the Australian Open.
“Touring can be really hard,” she says. “I do a lot of fun things, even if that is tennis, to feel … I don’t know.” She pauses, then breaks into a full-bellied laugh. “I’m still maneuvering this, if you can’t tell.”
Production Credits
Photography Direction by EMMA REEVES. Hair by KAZIA ROSEMOND. Makeup and Styling by MICHELLE MERCADO. Videographer: CLIFFORD L. JOHNSON. VFX Designer: MIGUEL FERNANDES. Lighting Direction by DAVID WALTER BANKS. Digital technician: DONNY TU. Additional retouching by MOLLY REPETTI. Studio: CHIL STUDIOS
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