Peace to snotty clerks

Letting these condescending shopkeeps know what's up (by copping beautiful things from them), the joy of repeating outfits & lyrics, whether art can love you back, and more with Faye Webster

Jul 16, 2024

Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.

Check our list of the world’s 35 slappiest shops, where Spyfriends have added a ton of favorites in the comments.

Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.

Our interviews with Nathan Fielder, André 3000, 100 gecs, Danielle Haim, Mac DeMarco, Jerry Seinfeld, Matty Matheson, Phoebe Bridgers, Seth Rogen, Emily Bode, Michael Stipe, Sandy Liang, Tyler, The Creator, Maya Hawke, King Krule, Steven Yeun, John C. Reilly, Clairo, Conner O’Malley and more are here.

— Jonah & Erin

Photo by Pooneh Ghana, courtesy of Faye Webster

Faye Webster is cool & her music is great. On the surface, you might mistake her for a “singer-songwriter traditionalist.” She likes a laidback tempo and a lush arrangement, a plainspoken refrain, some pedal-steel twang. But the more time you spend with her songs, the more their subtly strange physics emerge… lyrics & musical phrases stutter, drift & repeat so much they morph into trippy mantras… heart-on-sleeve romanticism bleeds into something weirder… electronic distortion tugs at the edges of the production… an Autotuned guest verse from Faye’s high-school friend Lil Yachty gives way to a virtuosic guest guitar solo from the legendary experimentalist Nels Cline of Wilco. (Side note: I once saw Nels Cline in a downtown NYC club play a guitar with an eggbeater, unless I’m thinking of Arto Lindsay?? It was a long time ago, shout out to both of them.)

Also Faye wrote a song about her “eBay Purchase History” and she f**ks with Blackbird Spyplane, which is tight.

Faye lives in Atlanta, but when she hit me on an Encrypted SpyVideo Call the other day, she was in L.A., where she’d rented a place for a couple weeks to chill out between touring legs in support of her new album, Underdressed at the Symphony, which is, like her 3 previous albums, gas.

So I (Jonah) was stoked to tap in with her about how repeating a good outfit for 6 months is like repeating a good chorus for 6 minutes, one of the most beautiful chess sets (!) I’ve ever seen, whether the art you love can love you back, and more unbeatable topics.

Blackbird Spyplane: Oh, “Faye’s iPad” — that’s sick. I do these calls on my laptop but I might gotta change my display name to “Jonah’s iPad” and fake it because that’s a tight look. Very my uncle. Shout out to doing things on iPads.

Faye Webster: “Oh does it say ‘Faye’s iPad?’ Haha I guess it does. My computer doesn’t have Zoom.”

Blackbird Spyplane: I’m gonna cut straight to it — I asked you to tell me about a unique possession you cherish, and you chose a travel chess set that is one of the dopest things anyone has ever picked for these. I’m not even a chess head, this is just an extremely beautiful object. What’s the story?

Faye Webster: “It’s a 1972 Fischer-Spassky World Championship commemorative travel chess set. I was walking around New York City with my girlfriend — I don’t even know what part, but I’d been to this chess shop years ago and said, let’s find that place again, and we did. I wasn’t on the hunt for anything, just looking around the store, and I saw this. I started asking the guy questions, and I felt like he wasn’t taking me seriously. But I was serious about it, and part of me wanted to buy it just to prove to him I was serious.”

Blackbird Spyplane: I love that urge to buy something expensive because you feel condescended to by the person selling it. It’s so funny, like, “I’ll show you, a**hole — here is my money.” It’s a retail experience you don’t encounter so much anymore, like the snotty clothing-store salesperson or the judgmental record-store dude. Those feel mostly like relics of a different era. Peace to this disdainful NYC chess man for keeping the snotty-clerk tradition alive.

Faye Webster: “I was in the shop texting my business manager, like, ‘I’m about to buy something really expensive, tell me not to or forever hold your peace!’ The board, the pieces — every bit of the concept and design I fell in love with.”

Blackbird Spyplane: I was reading up on Cy Endfield, the guy who designed this set, and he’s fascinating. Studied drama and mathematics at Yale, hung out with Orson Welles and Man Ray, directed noir movies, did sleight-of-hand magic at a very high level — and he was also big into chess and nice with metalsmithery (??) so in his spare time he came up with this travel set. Incredible polymath s**t. So in the past few years Endfield’s estate licensed the design and you can buy sets new for about $700 (link below), and the originals pop up at auction (above) for like $3000.”

Faye Webster: “This is the commemorative remake.”

Blackbird Spyplane: How do the pieces feel in hand? Nice weight?

Faye Webster: “They’re kind of the weight of a ring. And the way you store them is they run up the outside of these tubes. You know, the castle perfectly fits inside the queen. And then inside the tube is where all the pawns go. Then the board is mirrored and it folds up — every thing about this, I can’t think of another purchase I’ve made I’ve been so in love with.

“It almost looks like a pocketbook, and it’s really small so I carry it around with me everywhere. Chess does the same thing for me that tennis does. When I play, it’s all I’m thinking about. I’m an anxious person so that’s really calming to me.”

Blackbird Spyplane: So many things we do these days, we do in a state of partial distraction. I think part of the appeal of chess is that you’ve gotta fully lock in. Who do you play with?

Faye Webster: “Mostly my girlfriend because we’re together all the time, but I have an app where I play a lot, too. I grew up playing chess, and then really got back into it in like 2019, 2020 — like, I was on Chess.com focusing on my ranking really heavy. Then I started playing with Tyler, The Creator a lot. Our friendship kind of began off games. Games are a big bond for me. When I’m in Atlanta I have a game night, I always have a chess set with me on tour… Honestly, most of my most meaningful friendships started with games. Me and Kyle Ng from Brain Dead, same thing — it was, ‘Let’s play Warhammer.’

Blackbird Spyplane: Shout out to Tyler, friend of the Spyplane. You just toured through Copenhagen, a few weeks before we were there on a Travel Recon Mission. We ate so well, every meal, every day, did you hit any spots that were smacking?

Faye Webster: “I actually played a venue in Copenhagen called Vega that has its own private chef, and they make the performers a full five-course meal.”

Blackbird Spyplane: LiveN*tion needs to take notes from the Danes!

Faye Webster: “It was crazy.”

Blackbird Spyplane: What’s your relationship to clothes? I see photos of you wearing a lot of matching sets, a lot of L.A. lines like Brain Dead, KkCo and Meals, maybe some Dusen Dusen… You wore nothing but the same shade of blue for a couple years… Is getting dressed a source of pleasure for you, or do you stick to a few staples because it’s the kind of thing you wish you didn’t have to think about?

Faye Webster: “I don’t know that much about fashion, and I don’t go shopping for clothes. These days I mostly wear, like, one of the same 20 white tees and a rotation of the Brain Dead Minions pants. I’m either wearing Kyle’s clothes or my girlfriend’s — I’ll just wake up and wear whatever she has around, because I don’t want to think about it. I sometimes feel like I’m a cartoon character. My homie sent me a photo of Doug looking at his closet, and it’s just all the same outfit, and I’m kind of like that. If I find something I like, I wear it for 6 months, every day, because that’s what I’m comfortable in.”

Blackbird Spyplane: That reminds me of your songwriting — you like to find one evocative phrase and then repeat it over and over and over. Do you connect that part of your brain with the part that likes to repeat the same outfit?

Faye Webster: “That’s mad interesting. I never thought about it like that, but it’s probably true. With repetition, a big component of it for me is comfort. I want comfort in music, and I want comfort in clothes.”

Blackbird Spyplane: One of the first songs of yours I heard was “A Dream with a Baseball Player,” about you falling in love from afar with a guy on the Atlanta Braves, who has no idea you exist. You’re writing about a dynamic that’s as old as celebrity culture, but that really ramped up with the rise of podcasters and YouTubers, where we feel like we’re intimately familiar with all these people we don’t actually know, and who don’t know us. When you wrote that song, I wonder if you were working through feelings some of your fans must have for you?

Faye Webster: “Oh that’s really cool — yeah, I feel like, with me, I’m a very romantic person, and I think a song like that probably is relatable to a lot of people. That’s my hope. What I look for in music, and what I want to come out of my music, is to be able to feel related to.”

Blackbird Spyplane: The term people use for it is “parasocial relationship,” usually in a pejorative way: It resembles love, but isn’t actually love, because real love goes in two directions. Which is an important distinction to draw, but maybe it’s just about being more precise about the kind of love you’re feeling. Because there are paintings I love that, by definition, don’t “love me back.” Maybe the podcasters someone loves have created a version of themselves and put it out for public consumption, the same way a painter creates a painting—and you can love that version of the podcaster the same way you love the painting. And actually, thinking about it out loud, I feel like a truly great painting, or great song, or great movie, or whatever it is, does kind of love me back, in a way.

Faye Webster: “I definitely feel that way about some of my songs!”

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?