I was listening to Faye Webster speak from her home in Atlanta on the “How Long Gone” podcast about how she used to be something of a youth tennis star, how she doesn’t smoke weed but loves canned gin cocktails, how she practices yo-yo tricks while listening to EDM from a video game soundtrack.
Saying “I’m crying” out loud could scan as a wry adoption of online argot, winking at a feeling but a little afraid of it, how if you text a friend something really honest you might take out a little “haha” as an insurance policy.
Good days bleed into bad and back into good—she’s crying in a good way, she’s laughing because she’s just been hurt, and honestly who can tell the difference anymore? With Webster’s downy voice and a pedal-steel player named Matt “Pistol” Stoessel who almost steals the show, the album strikes a perfect balance between classic country stoicism and the sound of the saddest person you follow on social media.
“In a Good Way” takes a minute-and-a-half walk in the middle just to simmer in a ’90s nu-soul groove; the title track doesn’t even have a chorus; “Kind Of” ends on a three-minute vamp with the precise vibe of a Key West bar band playing a bossa nova tune at sunset.
“She said I’m funny and then I thanked her/But I know I’m funny haha.” You see the whole spectrum of her personality in that one line—polite, sensitive, arrogant, actually funny—especially in the staccato way she sings “haha.” She elevates a forgettable phrase we all type all of the time into a moment that defines her character as a songwriter.
None of those lines are sad in and of themselves, but they create the vulnerable atmosphere for Webster to detail the absurd magnitude of her sadness: “There’s a difference between lonely and lonesome/But I’m both all the time,” she sings, ever the grammarian.
The way Webster trills between two notes on the chorus of “Sometimes” and the strings follow her in unison; the way the piano ascends and the pedal steel descends at the end of “Better Distractions”; the way Webster drops the line, “There’s so much going on/My grandmother’s dead” in “A Dream With a Baseball Player,” a song about a teenage crush on Atlanta Braves outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr.