NEW ALBUMS JULY 2021 TAKE 290 1 JOHN GRANT (P20) 2 LUCY DACUS (P28) 3 BILLY F GIBBONS (P32) 4 ANTHONY JOSEPH (P35)
FAYE WEBSTER I Know I’m Funny haha SECRETLY CANADIAN
THE UNCUT GUIDE TO THIS MONTH’S KEY RELEASES
Atlanta wunderkind’s lonely, lonesome triumph.
By Stephen Deusner
“I don’t let myself out, butI like it like that”
ON “Both All The Time”, Faye Webster sounds so lonesome she could OF THE cry. Over a smear of pedal steel, a stairstepping piano and a slowmotion rhythm section, she digs into that old country plaint and realises, “There’s a difference between lonely and lonesome, but I’m both all the time”. The song depicts the Atlanta singer-songwriter/photographer/yo-yo enthusiast as a woman at home by herself, locked away with her thoughts and her beloved Harmony Strat. It’s an image that comes up repeatedly on her inviting and immersive fourth album, I Know I’m Funny haha: the artist drinking beer in the shower, sleeping with the lights on, watching the Atlanta Braves and crushing on a certain outfielder, often but not always missing someone. “I don’t let myself out, but I like it like that”, she explains.
While that image may resonate more powerfully during a pandemic, when everybody is stuck at home longing for human contact, Webster is no bedsit pop auteur looking at the world from a physical and emotional remove. An artist who combines a range of disparate styles into an idiosyncratic sound, she is a productive homebody, one who finds power in loneliness, making it not just the primary subject of her songs but a crucial part of her songwriting process. Rather than standing apart from the world, she has managed to rope off her own precious corner of it, a quiet place where she can parse her thoughts and feelings to find something deeper at the bottom of them.