On 2022’s Car Therapy Sessions EP, Faye Webster recruited a 20-piece orchestra to deliver new versions of songs from her last two albums. It had the effect of underlining both her vocal abilities and the understated richness of her arrangements, but that’s not an approach she seeks to emulate on her latest album, Underdressed at the Symphony. Strings do occasionally make an appearance, but only in a way that mirrors Webster’s occasional visits to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra – casual and impromptu, an escape amidst a flurry of thoughts rather than the main attraction. The center of attention sounds like the last thing Webster wants to be in her new music, despite retaining the freewheeling, relatable honesty of 2019’s Atlanta Millionaires Club and 2021’s I Know I’m Funny haha. Early recordings of Symphony were slathered in AutoTune, the kind of vocal processing Lil Yachty wears so naturally on ‘Lego Ring’, but which her friends and bandmates found “distracting or something” when applied that prominently on her voice.
She keeps it on ‘Feeling Good Today’, a charming vignette about finding comfort in small, daily victories that still can’t conceal a pervasive sense of anxiety, like when she admits it’s weird her neighbours know the name of her dog. Underdressed at the Symphony isn’t quite a feel-good album, but coming from a songwriter known for cleverly mixing humour and vulnerability, it’s also unusually and pointedly reserved for a breakup album. Webster still feels compelled to sing about the things she wants to sing about, but she now does it without divulging that many details or even really singing about thema. Maybe it’s a result of fame, or maybe it just reflects the mundane, empty spaces of going through heartbreak, the need to hide yourself from the world when it’s clearly the only thing towering over yours. The opening ‘Thinking About You’ ambles on for six minutes, but Webster doesn’t tell us much about the subject of her thoughts beyond a couple of intimate exchanges she’s aching to hold onto.
Yet it’s often not even clear what stage of the relationship Webster is reflecting on, as if there’s a mismatch between the moment she’s thinking, writing, and singing about. Maybe it’s the details our brains scribble out when things don’t quite pan out how you thought they would, the way separation muddles your definition of “a lifetime,” leaving you aimless and confused. “I used to be self-conscious/ Well really I still am/ I’m just better at figuring out why,” she sings on the self-consciously titled ‘Wanna Quit All the Time’. Webster doesn’t seem as intensely conflicted about her occupation as, say, Mitski in ‘Working for the Knife’, but a confluence of factors – being in the spotlight, but also melancholy, boredom, and perhaps just pure musical instinct – have caused her to slip into an even more naturalistic style, writing songs like the slumbering ‘eBay Purchase History’, where the one new thing in her life – learning, funnily enough, the word “anonymity” – comes into contrast with the line, “I’ve been listening to the same thing again/ Close my eyes I can smell my old apartment/ It’s kinda nice to have familiarity.”
Faye Webster may be playing it more low-key than ever, but she also has less of a filter, which makes the record subtly dynamic. She can lean on the deceptive silliness of ‘Feeling Good Today’ and ‘He Loves Me Yeah!’ because she stretches out the sentiments behind the longer songs, and she can write a song about wanting a Lego ring because she packs an album’s worth of romantic push-and-pull on the highlight ‘But Not Kiss’. And ultimately, she can end the album on a track as lighthearted and seemingly barren as ‘Tttime’ because when she sings about getting lost in a song, it’s not for lack of trying to make ones we can use for the same purpose. Its malaise feels earned after the genuinely pensive title track, in which she confesses, “I’m depriving myself of happiness/ Something I’m really good at.” You wonder if, in pulling back as a means of self-protection, Webster is denying some of the pleasures of cutting through the routine of it all, but Underdressed at the Symphony proves she’s capable of making personal and powerful music while stepping a little to the side. She makes herself comfortable, passes the time, and makes songs about how she manages it. Yet there are enough glimpses of lingering unease, of trying repeatedly to fashion yourself out of a wrong situation, that it can feel like a triumph.
