To take her words at face value, it seems as if she’s interested in staying just outside of the limelight. Her brush with virality certainly suggests as much.
Her songs like “Kingston,” “Right Side of My Neck,” and “In a Good Way” have all made the rounds on TikTok, soundtracking various trends and countless lip-syncing teens. “I Know You” alone has over 350,000 videos to its name – that’s 350,000 individual pieces of content, many with hundreds of thousands or even millions of views.
However, Webster seemed to intentionally sidestep any attention that her inadvertent social media dominance might have brought her way. She wasn’t on TikTok before any of these shenanigans, and she decidedly did not hop on the platform once her music was plastered all over it. In fact, she only knew of the phenomenon thanks to her friends. “I’m not really, like, on the internet. I’ll see videos [just because] people text it to me,” she admits. “I knew it was happening because people would tell me.”
She’s content to watch her songs grow in popularity from a distance. Where some artists might have attempted to fan the flames of the virtual moment, racing to crank out video after video in order to put a face to the disembodied voice, Webster remained unplugged. At the same time she was everywhere, she was keeping to herself.
And yet, her success is largely thanks to her brazen vulnerability and willingness to shine a light on her innermost thoughts. With each new project, she has come forth with more and more conviction, unafraid of lyrics using the real names of the people she knows or digging into the details of her day-to-day life.
Her 2017 self-titled sophomore effort first established the blueprint for her idiosyncratic, low-key brand of slice-of-life storytelling. The two projects that followed, 2019’s Atlanta Millionaires Club (which came with a Consequence CoSign) and 2021’s I Know I’m Funny haha, found Webster refining the formula, folding in the sense of humor referenced in that latter title. Songs like “Kingston” introduced many of the quirks that would go on to define Webster’s artistic identity: slightly deadpan vocals, deep emotions packed into short verses, deceptively simple choruses, and, of course, the now-viral asides (“He said baby – that’s what he called me – I love you”).
With Underdressed at the Symphony, she’s come through with the most potent distillation of her personality yet. Whether she’s silly and in love on “He Loves Me Yeah!” or admitting to her self-destructive tendencies on the title track (“I’m depriving myself of happiness/ Something I’m really good at”), the record is Webster revealed.
“I’d run things by somebody and be like, ‘Hmm, should I not say this about whatever?’ They’re like, ‘No, you said it for a reason,’” she explains. “I feel like the past couple records, I really struggled with that. Whereas now, I’m like, if that’s what was on my mind, I feel like it was meant to be on my mind for a reason.”
More than just a reference to Webster’s habitual escape to the orchestra, Underdressed at the Symphony works to describe the many paradoxes at the heart of Webster’s work: vulnerable reserve, planned improvisation, and understatement that stands out in a crowd. She’s honest enough to share intimate details from her life through quotable lyrics, but self-aware enough (or, perhaps, self-conscious enough) to feel the need to ease the tension with a wry, often self-deprecating joke. She says,
”There’s a lot of honesty in my
songwriting, and
I think that’s why
I have so much
comic relief”
It’s a responsive safeguard she illustrates right at the beginning of our conversation. Fresh off an Australian tour with a North American run including Coachella on the horizon, she admits to feeling overwhelmed before quickly qualifying herself. “But in a good way, but excited,” she says, undercutting a moment that might otherwise be “too honest.”
Alternatively, take her new cut “Wanna Quit All the Time”: “I wanna quit all the time/ I think about it all the time/ It’s the attention that freaks me out,” she sings over wailing pedal steel. Once again risking being overly candid, she turns around and pokes fun at her mopey disposition in the stanza that immediately follows: “Overthinking in my head again/ I’m good at making shit negative/ Right now I hate the color of my house.”
Instances like these find Webster fully embodying the duality of her nature, giving into both her instinct to share everything that’s on her mind and her hesitation to call attention to herself. Taken literally, it’s somewhat of a difficult contradiction to reconcile. Instead, Webster seems to not reason with the two impulses, letting her gut take the wheel.