New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Today, Faye Webster releases a video for her new single "A
Dream With A Baseball Player," from her anticipated new album, out this Friday, on Secretly Canadian. The song is a snapshot of Webster's one-time teenage crush on Atlanta Braves outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr., who she met when she was invited to sing at a Braves game in 2019. The music video was directed by Swinsky.
"A song about Ronald Acuna Jr, obviously. Off tour I spent so much of my time watching baseball that I thought I wanted to be a baseball player. But I'm not, so I guess the next best thing was having a crush on one," says Webster. "I guess this song explains what having a crush feels like. Having made up conversations with them in your head even though you don't speak their language, wearing their team jersey every day, things that make you feel closer to this person that you don't know at all. But I sang at the Braves game, and they let us meet so I think I got that one out of my system."
Faye Webster has also expanded her upcoming headlining tour in support of the album. Tickets are available now at fayewebster.com.
I Know I'm Funny haha marks the latest effort from the 23-year-old artist and her most fully realized effort to date. Though she usually tackles album-making in a song-by-song approach, 2020 necessitated a more intensive recording process. Webster immediately knew the Athens-based players she wanted to record with and headed into the studio with producer/mixer Drew Vandenberg (Deerhunter, Of Montreal, Kishi Bashi). They assembled a band including Harold Brown on drums, Bryan
Howard on bass, Nic Rosen on keys and Matt "
Pistol" Stoessel on pedal steel - one of the most reliable and essential musical elements of Webster's records.
A self-taught guitarist by elementary school, with a long tradition of bluegrass and country players in her family, Webster was bound to be a musician. At just 16 she released her debut album, Run & Tell. Like other teenage phenoms
Jackson Browne and
Laura Marling, it exhibited stunning lyrical and artistic clarity. Her Southern roots were obvious but Webster had more than country music inspiring her worldview - she was deeply embedded in the culture of her hometown, Atlanta. L'il Yachty was her classmate, she was sneaking out to see underground shows and fortuitously had befriended rapper/producer Ethereal while in High School. She went on to sign to Awful Records, making her label-mates with Father,
Playboi Carti and Ethereal. To the outsider, an odd home but Webster shared the same weirdo art-kid ethos of her label mates - impossible to peg, endlessly experimenting, making s, doing stuff, genre-fluid rule breakers.
Her 2017 self-titled release on Awful brought her enough notoriety to get her signed to Secretly Canadian, the home of ANOHNI, Porridge Radio, Whitney, Yoko Ono and more. Two years later, she released Atlanta
Millionaires Club to widespread critical acclaim. "Few R&B albums have a pedal steel; few alt-country albums have a rap feature. Faye Webster's Atlanta
Millionaires Club somehow has all of the above. Even stranger, she manages to smooth these apparent contradictions into serene folk-pop with a mellow soul tinge. Webster is an anomaly, but her arty individualism represents an important common value," said Pitchfork.
A multi-hyphenate talent, Webster also is a successful photographer who has shot campaigns for
Killer Mike, Offset, D.R.A.M, Nike and other brands. She is a sometimes model and full-time yoyo enthusiast. Webster incorporates her yoyo skills into her live show. In 2020 Barack Obama included her single "Better Distractions," on his playlist of favorite songs and she also released the single "In A Good Way." Both songs appear on I Know I'm Funny haha.
