Faye Webster performs to a sold-out crowd at KEMBA Live! on March 6, 2025. Credit: Sandra Fu | Lantern Photo Editor
What defines Faye Webster’s music, more so than the wry sadness that permeates her lyrics or beautiful arrangements of strings, brass and pedal steel guitar, is the way she finds catharsis in complete restraint.
Case in point: when Webster took the stage at KEMBA Live! Thursday night — to the deafening screams of a sold-out crowd, no less — she stepped to the microphone with just a single light shining on her.
Strumming a lone note on her guitar, she sang in her wispy, heady voice: “I want to sleep in your arms” — holding on to that last word, cueing her backing band to enter after the payoff — “but not kiss.”
The song, aptly titled “But Not Kiss,” comes off the wonderfully loose 2024 album that Webster is touring behind, “Underdressed at the Symphony.” Hearing it live, the tension that’s merely suggested on the studio version becomes transformatively devastating.
As the drums fell in, Webster twirled away from her microphone to move with the music, driving and propulsive. The crowd, once again, lost its mind.
Webster last performed in Columbus in September 2021 at A&R Music Bar, the smaller next-door neighbor of KEMBA.
The Atlanta-based singer-songwriter had released her brilliant, marvelously morose third studio album, “I Know I’m Funny haha,” in June that year to critical acclaim, but hadn’t yet found the viral popularity on apps like TikTok that has since propelled her to larger stages and bigger venues.
Standing front row at that 2021 show, I remember how intimate Webster made the space feel, how conversational her music felt. What stood out most was her complete control of the performance, as well as her ability to keep the audience hanging on to her every word.
Four years later, on a larger stage surrounded by a crowd about five times as large, Webster’s sense of control remained impeccable.
Compared to 2021, Thursday’s concert featured a higher production value. Behind Webster was a backdrop of lights resembling a row of washing machines, clothing racks with shirts hanging on them and a massive screen shaped like a T-shirt, projecting everything from Minions — with one even sporting her haircut — to a video game playing behind her as she performed the song “Lego Ring.”
But Webster’s music remained as close, tender and mesmerizing as ever.
It was also as wonderfully full-bodied as it has ever sounded, thanks in no small part to her stellar backing band filling every song with little flourishes that pull from jazz, country and classical music alike.
Throughout the show, Webster and her band let themselves cut loose and jam. In faking out the ending to “Wanna Quit All The Time” by switching guitars, she allowed the song’s lengthy, noodling exit feel all the more rewarding.
On longer cuts like “Thinking About You,” Webster pulled away from the chorus, letting her bandmates fill in the blanks, with bassist Noor Khan playing underneath the melody, or instrumentalist Annie Leeth improvising on the keys.
Elsewhere, on “A Dream With A Baseball Player,” the band slowed Webster’s hopeless longing for Atlanta Braves all-star outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr. down into lovestruck, sleepwalking funk.
The subtle interplay brought the tune to life, with drummer Charles LaMont Garner’s fills colliding around Leeth’s saxophone melody and Khan’s bass lines crawling up and down Matt “Pistol” Stoessel’s pedal steel slides. Stoessel, a frequent presence in Webster’s music since her 2019 breakout album, “Atlanta Millionaire’s Club,” is arguably the most essential part of her touring outfit.
At their best, Webster’s band matched her ability to turn on a dime, like they did on the evening’s centerpiece, “Jonny.”
Webster launched into the song, a hopelessly sad lament to an unrequited love, slow and funky, with her hands on the warbling keys, Khan’s loping bass and Leeth’s saxophone playing around Garner’s drowsy waltz.
When the song’s withering chorus came to an end — “this wasn’t supposed to be a love song, but I guess it is now, isn’t it?” — that waltz threatened to erupt, drums crashing as the crowd picked up.
Instead, after two quick stabs from Leeth’s sax, the song switched back into its dirge-like state, with Webster delivering the song’s reprise, a self-described “strange poem about a plain and ready white wall,” with a voice almost cartoonishly lovelorn.
As the poem concluded, the band picked up, lights flashing, Webster’s hands smashing into the keyboard, saxophone squalling as they all crescendoed into the loudest peak of the night. Again, right as the band readied to burst, two quick hits brought the song back, dissipating into its muted, lonesome waltz.
On a night where the crowds often sang along to Webster’s every word, this moment seemed to stun them into silence. As the song fizzled out, the cheers came flooding in anyway, another moment of catharsis in a show filled with them.
Rating: 5/5
