How Indie Thinking Helped Faye Webster Create Her Own Musical Universe — And Prepare For Her Move to a Major

When Faye Webster is back home in Atlanta, she likes to visit Oakland Cemetery. “I always go there when I’m home from a tour and just walk around by myself,” she says.

It’s not that the cemetery is the final resting place of any of her loved ones, or that Webster enjoys checking out the tombstones of Atlanta’s rich and famous, like musician Kenny Rogers or golfer Bobby Jones, who are both buried there. She just sees it as “a peaceful, safe space” to find silence amid her increasingly chaotic life.

Last year, Webster, 27, released her fifth album, Underdressed at the Symphony, and played 77 shows to support it — a lot by anyone’s measure, but a touring itinerary that was particularly challenging for Webster. Despite her fast-growing success, the soft-spoken homebody has never loved the spotlight. “Navigating it is tough, but I had a friend give me the advice to call someone I love after the show every day to remind myself of what’s real,” she says. “So I asked my mom, ‘Hey, can I call you at 10:10 every night?’ Now we always do it.”

She has other ways of making the road feel like home — like the added comfort of having her ­older brother Jack as her guitar tech; her best friend, Noor Kahn, on bass; and her bandmates of many years by her side. (Her other elder ­brother, Luke, handles her merchandise and graphic design.) She also has a go-to warmup routine for shows. “I always get everyone together and we recite the battle of the bands prayer from School of Rock: ‘Let’s rock, let’s rock today!’ Then we go onstage,” she says.

Originally, Webster had asked to meet at the cemetery for this interview, but with heavy rain projected in the forecast, we decide to talk over matcha and baked goods at a nearby café instead. Between bites of a guava pastry, Webster says that when she gets the rare opportunity to be at home, she spends time with friends and family or tends to her many hobbies, which include — but are not limited to — yo-yo, tennis, Pokémon, the Atlanta Braves and Animal Crossing. And, she says with a laugh, “I have so many collections of so many different things. So many dumb things.” Her house is littered with it all. “I was collecting alarm clocks for a while, then I filled a full shelf and I was like, ‘OK, there’s no more space.’ I did my yo-yo shelf, too. I have tons of vinyl. Now I need something new to collect, so I’m buying CDs,” she explains. Her latest purchase? A copy of Alison Krauss and Robert Plant’s Raising Sand from Criminal Records in Atlanta.

“I remember the first time I heard her sing when I was a kid. I thought, ‘I didn’t know people could sing like this,’ ” Webster recalls of Krauss. “She has this very soft, angelic, pristine voice. When I first heard her sing I thought, ‘I want to be her.’ ”

Webster self-released her debut, Run and Tell, an earnest and straightforward Americana record, in 2013 when she was just 16. Back then, her voice was still developing and didn’t yet have the bell-like clarity and melancholic whine that she is beloved for now. Soon after, Webster’s path crossed with the Atlanta hip-hop scene when she started photographing and hanging out with the young rappers signed to tastemaking indie label Awful Records. Around this time, she also grew closer to another emerging local rapper, Lil Yachty — whom she ultimately collaborated with on Underdressed single “Lego Ring.” With Awful, “It started as just a friendship for months, and then it grew to me signing there,” says Webster, who was an oddball addition to the label as its first non-rap artist.

But for Webster, it didn’t feel strange at all — she was just putting out music with help from her friends. “I loved my experience with Awful. I think, to this day, what I learned there was about creating this sense of family and community. I still hold those values today,” she says.

After releasing 2017’s Faye Webster with Awful, she moved to indie powerhouse Secretly Group and its Secretly Canadian label. There, she steadily accumulated millions of fans as she released 2019’s Atlanta Millionaires Club, 2022’s I Know I’m Funny haha and Underdressed. (Secretly also now distributes her self-­titled album.)

Her career hit hyper-speed about two years ago when she scored surprise TikTok hits with “I Know You” and “Kingston” — which were about 7 and 5 years old, respectively, when they took off. Those viral moments shifted her audience away from indie-loving Pitchfork dudes and toward a younger, more female crowd; her recent shows have been marked by throngs of adoring fangirls. Ironically, Webster isn’t even on TikTok — and she barely posts on social media in general.

“Faye is amazing — and somewhat of a contradiction as an artist,” says Secretly Group vp of A&R Jon Coombs, who, with his team, signed Webster to Secretly. “She bucks industry trends by not being online that much, but she still has great social media success. She’s someone who is so impossibly cool, yet she likes traditionally uncool things like yo-yoing and gaming. All of these things combined make her a really compelling and singular artist.”

To connect her whimsical hobbies to her much more serious music career, Webster introduced custom yo-yos as merch in collaboration with Brain Dead Studios, which is run by her friend and creative director Kyle Ng. (“Individuality and being her own character adds so much to her as a musician,” he says.) She also incorporated Bob Baker Marionettes into the Ng-directed “But Not Kiss” music video; founded an annual yo-yo invitational in Berkeley, Calif.; started an active Discord server with a dedicated channel to all things Minions; and has repeatedly covered the Animal Crossing theme at her gigs.

“I look out at shows now and see people dressed up like Minions and having fun and singing and I think, ‘This is so beautiful. This is why I do it,’ ” Webster says. “I really appreciate that my music can resonate with anybody. That’s all I’ve ever wanted — for somebody to feel they can relate to my work.”

Her hobbies also seep into her songs, like Underdressed’s “eBay Purchase History” or Funny’s “A Dream With a Baseball Player,” which is about her lasting crush on Atlanta Braves star Ronald Acuña Jr.

“She has this ability to pack a short story into a single line,” Coombs says of her lyricism. From “The day that I met you I started dreaming” (“Kingston”) to “You make me want to cry in a good way” (“In a Good Way”) and “Are you doing the same things? I doubt it” (“Underdressed at the Symphony”), Webster’s economical songwriting often repeats phrases on a loop, each refrain cutting to a deeper emotional core. Her expertly crafted productions — Wurlitzer keys, smooth Southern-rock guitar and plenty of pedal steel — seal the deal.

For Webster, “initial reactions” and “gut feelings” are the anchors of the songwriting and recording process. “To me, I’m just like, ‘Oh, that sounded good! Let me say it again…’ However the song plays out is sometimes just the way it’s supposed to happen,” she says.

As part of that instinctive approach, Webster has historically recorded songs soon after writing them. “I just like to do things in the moment,” she says. “When writing a song, I’ve often texted my friends, my band, and tried to get everyone together while it’s still fresh.” She typically self-records her vocals at home and the rest in nearby Athens. Most recently, however, she tried recording Underdressed at famed West Texas studio Sonic Ranch.

“That was our first experience going somewhere new,” she says. “My producer [Drew Vandenberg] was like, ‘What if we go somewhere else?’ And I was like, ‘OK, if it’s you and it’s me and it’s Pistol [pedal steel player Matt Stoessel] and all the band, it shouldn’t matter where we go.’ ”

Now, as she works on her next album, Webster is taking another leap of faith: signing her first major-label deal with Columbia Records, where she’ll join a roster that includes Beyoncé, Vampire Weekend and Tyler, The Creator (whose Camp Flog Gnaw festival she performed at last year). When asked why she signed there, she pauses, taking a sip of matcha as she thinks. “It comes back to that initial gut, that initial intuition,” she finally answers. “[Columbia] feels like where I belong right now and that’s where I’m supposed to exist.”

Perhaps it’s thanks to the flexibility her time on indie labels offered, or the support system it allowed her to build — but so far, Webster has deftly navigated the music business without sacrificing her personality, her community or her privacy, and she doesn’t see that changing under Columbia. “I think throughout this process [of signing the new deal], I’ve been very up front and honest. I was like, ‘Don’t be surprised if I say no to a lot of things.’ I think being honest and having an understanding of each other is really important in any relationship.”

“I know it’s a buzzword, but Faye is just so relentlessly authentic,” says her manager, Look Out Kid founder and partner Nick O’Byrne. “Over the years, I’ve seen she’s not interested in doing anything that feels unnatural to her, and from talking to fans, I know that they’re smart and they see that in her, too.”

When I ask Webster if this signing is an indication that she is more comfortable in the spotlight now, she quickly replies “no” with a laugh. “I think I’m just always going to be this way.”

This story appears in the June 7, 2025, issue of Billboard.