Description
Label Review.
2019 album also available on Vinyl.
Our Overview.
Singer songwriter Atlanta born Faye Webster releases her new album ‘Atlanta Millionaires Club’ following on from her self titled LP in 2017. On ‘Atlanta Millionaires Club’, the omnipresence of pedal steel eschews bluegrass trappings, flexible under Webster’s genre-bending direction. Webster didn’t set out to make her new album sound like any artist in particular – in fact, she says the recording process was the opposite, trying to avoid sounding like any contemporaries – but she cites Aaliyah as her main musical inspiration for how she uses sound.
“That’s where I first heard, ‘Oh, there’s this weird guitar that’s bendy and it could totally be in a country song,’ but the way she’s using it is what makes her music so special to me,” Webster explains. “I try to do that. I try to change the way pedal steel is supposed sound, to use it differently than its traditional sound.”
Pulling from a familial lineage of folk storytelling and time spent in Atlanta’s hip-hop scene, Webster’s work is a study of duality, weaving through her own introversion and heartbreak; it’s an idiosyncratic sadness punctuated by fleeting observations and an unexpected, sly sense of humour. Webster lifted the Atlanta Millionaires Club title from the name her father used for his group of up-and-coming friends in grad school that went on to become a sponsored club that competed in 5k races and donut eating contests for charity, the name a showy, stark contrast with the friends’ reality.
As both an artist and a person, Webster is made up of contradictions. Like the way she takes the traditional instrumentation of Americana and flips it into something else, she uses her own calm, laid-back demeanour to assert that you can be confidently and unapologetically yourself in a quiet way, too.
Across ‘Atlanta Millionaires Club’, Webster’s feather-light vocals unfurl like a sigh, her voice and slinking hues of sleepy R&B acting as sonic through-lines on an album stitched together by intimate songwriting about lonesomeness in spite of Webster’s connection to a larger community. “There’s a lot of lonesomeness in Atlanta Millionaires Club,” Webster explains. “Sure, I can sing love songs, or songs about doing nothing, literally, but they all kind of go back to me being alone all the time.”