Welcome back to er0b albums, the mid-month email that “goes long” on a single album. This month, Faye Webster’s observational record, I Know I’m Funny haha.
Faye Webster’s lyrics are sometimes just a word or two. These phrases are circuitous, expounded upon by tonality and harmony, or milky pedal steel, or emphatic finger picking. She repeats the “Will you” in “Will you be with me?” as if slipping on an idea, the “me” almost timid. The statements on the other side of these repetitions are feelings being articulated in the instance they’re said: “I got two friends that I could see / But they got two jobs and a baby / I just wanna see you.” Here on “Better Distractions” and elsewhere on I Know I’m Funny haha, songs extend past their lyrics, less akin to jams and more like someone wandering off.
I Know I’m Funny haha moves at its own pace and invites you to walk along with it. It’s a slow-moving slice of life. Lose yourself in the repetition, let the shuffling percussion and slowly strummed guitar carry you off. I Know I’m Funny haha is languid—words and sounds stretch like worn sweaters over a coat hanger.
Faye Webster’s lyrics live in the commonplace. Desire is ordinary. On “Sometimes” she says with ease, “I want a kid, one that looks like you and me.” Later on the album she apologizes for going to sleep first. And on the title track, she sits on the porch drinking, gossiping, reminiscing. The “haha” is a little punctuation before joking about something actually funny—“Right now, we both want to be rockstars.” “I Know I’m Funny, haha” feels like eavesdropping on droll inside jokes: she jokes about how she gifted the other person in the conversation a bass like “the guy from Linkin Park plays.”
Elsewhere, fantasies distract from the everyday. Groove-driven “A Dream With A Baseball Player” indulges in a shameless crush. “How did I fall in love with someone I don’t know?” It has a different meaning depending on where you put the question mark. Saxophone floats in and out like the daydreams that help avoid the real-life stressors Webster lists later in the song. “I’ll just keep wearin’ his name on my shirt,” she concludes—a literal heart-on-sleeve.
Faye Webster does a lot of crying on this record. Strings well like tears as she sings, “You make me want to cry in a good way.” When they flow—both high violin and low cello—they mingle with watery synths and acoustic guitar. “Will I stop crying for once? It’s hurting my eyes,” Webster complains on “Both All The Time.” This track lives in the low-end of piano and bass, mimicking the rumination of being both “alone and lonely.” Meanwhile, “A Stranger” sounds like a 50s torch song with spoken word interludes. She starts by saying she’ll listen to a song on repeat, “cry for no reason at all.” Feelings are processed in the moment, here and gone like the whisper of piano keys.
Just as these lyrics are thoughts worked out as they’re said, the music kind of feels like that too. Improvisations and surprises find their way into meandering songs—like musicians riding the vibe of an established chord structure. When she sings “I got too much time” on “Sometimes,” you get the feeling the rest of the composition is going to take its time too. Drawn out and glistening, the title’s sung in harmonies reminiscent of the Beach Boys singing “Deirdre.” Each guitar string can be heard as a chord is strummed, keys loll in and out of your ears. As she wonders about a current love’s past loves on “Kind Of,” the drums beat faster, like a racing heart, before pacing down and letting guitar and organ keys settle in. “I don’t feel this kind of type of way” repeats on the outro, for longer than you’d expect. Routine is comfort.
Which we then can circle back to “Better Distractions.” Opening the album, Webster finds day-to-day life disrupted by someone’s absence. The vocal melody climbs up the scale gradually, settling back in place at the beginning of the phrase—an escalating stream of consciousness. The grand irony is that she’s somewhat bored with these routines: “I tried to eat, I tried to sleep, but everything seems boring to me.” It’s hard to break free of ceaseless familiarity.
“Alone, alone / What could go wrong again?” begins the last song, “Half of Me.” Again, solitude is marked by an absence of a person: “I’m missing a whole half of me.” It’s the least elaborate of the album’s arrangements—just a gentle guitar that lets Webster’s silken voice take the spotlight. Without the winding and unwinding of the album’s lush arrangements, only the feelings remain. Habits form and are interrupted. Memories of kicking it in the old house, or of boredom, or of crying on the bus, are repeated until they blur into oblivion. It’s like she sings on “Sometimes:” “If I write about nothing, then what would they say?”