Faye Webster is more than a sad girl indie star

Right now, the world is in thrall to the reign of sad girl indie, and Faye Webster has unexpectedly found herself its incumbent queen. It’s a flat description of the Atlanta singer-songwriter’s allure, who remains a mysteriously open yet reserved character. In interviews, she is affable, but turns her camera off. She can clam up about details of her music, but wax lyrical on her love for yo-yos. And even though she has connected with people across the globe, Webster is notoriously private.

Why is Webster’s music simply ‘sad girl indie’? Her penchant for yearning, plaintive lyricism in songs such as ‘Kingston’ and ‘I Know You’ has won the musician a legion of equally heartbroken fans on TikTok, and her songs regularly appear on Spotify’s ‘Sad Indie’ playlist. Even before the app existed, Webster’s unique blend of crooning R&B melodies and bluegrass instrumentals marked her as a true individual in a sea of indie folk artists.

But for the first time in a long time, Webster has found herself enveloped in loneliness and longing in the making of her recently released new album, ‘Underdressed at the Symphony’. It was partially recorded after her split with former long-term boyfriend, Boothlord (“It’s all love”). Before, Booth moved in with Webster during the pandemic to fill the quiet; now she found herself with a lot of time to kill, finding ways to cope with the silence.

To deal with the breakup, Webster’s solution can be found in the title of the record: spontaneous trips to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. “A part of it being so therapeutic to me was like, I don’t know anybody here and nobody knows me, and I don’t even know what I’m listening to,” she explains. “Sometimes I’m there and I don’t know what I’m listening to, and that’s sometimes not the reason I’m even there. It’s just kind of the experience in general.”

So yes, ‘Underdressed’ is a breakup record, and you can hear the traces of the aftermath across the album. But the album contains an entire world of emotions within and beyond just sadness. Take ‘But Not Kiss’, which Webster calls one of the “heavier” songs. There’s undertones of frustration and confusion beneath the obvious sadness, where Webster exists in a liminal space of intimacy and alienation.

“I was really struggling with these contradicting feelings,” she says. “The reason I wrote that song was because I couldn’t really find it anywhere else. I never found a song or a piece that portrayed that anti-romantic feeling I was feeling.”

In fact, the secondary emotion one detects throughout the album is not sadness, but boredom. Webster has explored this before her last album, 2021’s ‘I Know I’m Funny Haha’, written in the bleak dullness of pandemic. Here, she revisits boredom in a completely new context on closer ‘Tttttime’, a meandering ditty that flits between hope and emptiness: “Don’t go out anymore / In half an hour I’ll be bored / I got t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-time”.

Why does Webster reference boredom so much in her songwriting? “I think it’s inspiring because there’s things I think of that I wouldn’t be able to do if I didn’t reach such a state of boredom,” she says. “And I feel like those are like my favourite moments in songwriting. Even though I’m not really saying anything important, at the same time, I feel like those are the most relatable thoughts. Maybe that’s why I tend to write songs when I’m very isolated.”

In spite of Webster’s isolation, several threads of companionship can be found glinting in the record’s tapestry. The singer recruited guitarist Nels Cline from Wilco, who she previously toured with, along with childhood friend Lil Yachty to write ‘Lego Ring’. Yachty and Webster’s bond has only strengthened in recent years as they’ve watched each others’ careers rapidly ascend, with Yachty dropping surprise psych-rock record ‘Let’s Start Here’ last year.

“That’s always the person I’ve gone to have conversations with, and that’s been really nice,” says Webster. “That alone was something we’ve always had a connection to each other about – somebody you grow up with and then years later, seeing them doing something that you also have a passion for.”

According to Webster, Yachty even bought her two Lego rings in commemoration of their collaboration, one of which she wears every day. “Having him wasn’t random – he put out one of my favourite projects over the time of me making this record,” she explains. “Our friendship is so important to me, so that was very sentimental to me.”

The record also contains Webster’s longtime trusted band who have soundtracked her dreamy pedal-steel arrangements since 2019’s ‘Atlanta Millionaires Club’. It was their natural camaraderie that gave Webster the space to create more extended, contemplative instrumentals, where the band would riff off each other such as in ‘Wanna Quit All The Time’: “There’s a moment at the end of that song where we faded out, and then my drummer was like… and one, two, three!”, Faye chuckles. “He came back in as a joke, but then I was like, wait – let’s do that.”

Webster also incorporated her newfound love affair with the orchestra; whilst she has previously dabbled in orchestral arrangements on 2022 EP ‘Car Therapy Sessions’, ‘Underdressed’ is an ode to the music she discovered through her recent excursions. “I found myself listening to a lot of Ryuichi Sakamoto,” she says. “That was something that really consumed my ears for a long time. Hearing the way that Ryuchi uses strings is so beautiful – that was the first thing I was really listening to that was very inspiring for me.”

Hearing Webster speak about ‘Underdressed at the Symphony’, it’s clear the record contains multitudes of emotion outside of ‘sad girl indie’, like any other record Webster has produced. From an outsider’s perspective, it must be frustrating to be boxed into such a reductive category, and Webster is not alone in this newfound trajectory. Her current label is part of the Secretly Group, which also houses Mitski and Phoebe Bridgers, the latter of which has spoken out against the “fetishisation” of female pain.

But Webster is coy when pressed about her thoughts on unnecessary labels bestowed upon her: “I try very purposefully not to get involved in that stuff,” she says carefully.

“There’s definitely listeners out there that do get it though,” she continues. “If you know, you know. If you’ve actually listened to the entire record, you’ll know. I leave it for those types of listeners. It’s nice to take away anything from music, and if that’s what you take away from it, then cool – I did something.”

Webster is not oblivious to the attention she’s been receiving, though the singer is not on TikTok, she has noticed a definite uptick in fans attending her shows across the years, and has even been the unwitting victim of a phone hurled at her on stage (Webster’s in-ears meant she completely missed what was going on, but a friend sent her a TikTok of the moment later).

She admits the fame is “hard to manoeuvre”, but Webster isn’t worried about being misinterpreted or reduced as a sad girl. At the end of the day, she sees what she takes from the music – connection: “I love my fans so much. It makes me feel really humble because what I look for in music is wanting to feel related to or understood. Being able to see all these people feeling that way, that’s really beautiful.”

Faye Webster’s ‘Undressed at the Symphony’ is out now

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