Don’t ask Faye Webster about her dog. She will only reveal his breed off the record, and she’s suspicious that locals in her town have already learned too much. “My neighbors know his name/Thought that was weird but I’m over it,” she sings halfway through her fifth album, through a vocoder’s digital mask. Her protective impulses extend beyond her beloved pet. The Atlanta singer-songwriter finds ways to experience music away from the public eye, dropping in unannounced as the bassist for local punks Upchuck and ducking into the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra at the last minute; the latter habit inspired the title of her latest record. On Underdressed at the Symphony, she frequently steps back from the mic and allows her band, or occasionally just silence, to fill in the empty space. It’s a record about hiding—from heartbreak, from fame—that, whether through vocal processing or omission, fittingly obscures Webster from view.
Webster began building a richer sound around her wispy, honeyed vocals on her 2022 EP Car Therapy Sessions, where she brought in a 20-piece orchestra to cover songs from her previous two albums. For Webster, the EP was a chance to lose herself in the music swirling around her confessional songs: “I would just forget lyrics or forget where I am because I was listening to [the orchestra] play,” she said. But where that album accentuated the ethereal qualities of her songs, Underdressed at the Symphony emphasizes the naturalism of her songwriting, building melodies with a grand piano, a drum kit, and an electric guitar.
Gone are the sweeping synths that provided a cushion for her diaristic musing; this time, Webster leans into the acoustic sounds of a freewheeling jam session. Her backing players—many of whom have been performing with her since her early days—take steps into the foreground. On “Wanna Quit All the Time,” where she admits that “it’s the attention that freaks me out,” yawning pedal steel and sparkling Fender Rhodes seem to speak in her stead. Here, as on the similarly impressionistic “He Loves Me Yeah!,” she brings in a new voice to help further obscure her own: the sound of Wilco’s Nels Cline on the guitar, plucking out elegant solos where another verse might otherwise go. “Lifetime” stretches the repetition of a single phrase—“in a lifetime”—into something like jazz, Charles Garner’s drumming keeping a loose pace as Nick Rosen’s piano carries the song to its quiet conclusion. As Webster tells it, she didn’t want the song to end, so she asked Rosen to keep it going through subtle chord changes. The extended coda lets her linger in the shadow of his piano a little longer, an audience to her own private symphony.
This is loosely a breakup album, but Webster is loath to discuss the dirty details, either in lyrics or interviews. The quips and pithy one-liners that captured her tangled views on love and friendship on previous records are largely absent here, replaced by simple phrases or single syllables, repeated endlessly. Her longest songs—“Lifetime” and “Thinking About You”—reveal the least, their lyrics like set dressing for the band to take center stage. When she’s at her most verbose, guest features and the dense distortion of a vocoder serve as a shield. “Lego Ring,” featuring Webster’s childhood friend Lil Yachty, offers relief from the somber themes across the rest of the record, as she leans into the playfulness of Yachty’s processed vocals. On “Feeling Good Today,” Webster buries her anxieties about fame behind electronic manipulation. The closest we get to a glimpse into her relationship is “But Not Kiss,” an “anti-love” song that uses a single word—“Yeah”—as its chorus. “I want to sleep in your arms,” she croons before the second half of the sentence delivers the blow: “But not kiss.” Sparsely written yet powerfully delivered, commanding in its patience, it’s a signpost for where Webster's music might go next, one that uses her voice as another instrument in an ever-growing orchestra, rather than the conductor at its center.
If you previously came to Webster’s music for her lyrics, this album might seem like a retreat. But if you, like Webster, feel most at home in the warm glow of a band in the pocket of a groove, Underdressed at the Symphony delivers just under 40 minutes of gentle melodies and extended jams, a soft landing pad after the end of a romance. It’s understandable that the vulnerability that accompanies a breakup might have encouraged Webster, already averse to fame, to take a step back from the spotlight. But there are also moments where her voice is sorely missed; it’s hard to not dream of a world where these rich arrangements made a home for her sharp writing, as they did on her orchestral EP. Here, Webster isn’t so much underdressed as overshadowed by her own symphony, but that might be by design: On Underdressed at the Symphony, Webster seems most comfortable singing in silhouette.
