Georgia Webster on Debut Album “EVERYTHING MUST GO!”, Smartphones, and Spirituality

Have you ever met someone who had “go big or go home” written all over their face? That’s Georgia Webster for me. I’ve kept up with the pop singer/songwriter since 2021, when she was a senior in high school blowing up for her debut single “Tell Your Mom”, a song with the hilarious hook, “Tell your mom to stop calling me!” After seeing that, the only thing that would shock me more than her releasing an album and promptly ditching her smartphone, would be if she was nonchalant about an album release.

Georgia Webster, photo by Gracie Hall

Georgia and I first met at a concert three years ago when she was opening for Kelsea Ballerini. The interaction was brief, but now we’ve gone deep. Every Instagram post she made before this spring has been deleted, but I’ve been obsessed with her music long enough that I remember her journey over the last five years. 

Signing with River House Artists and Sony Music immediately after graduating high school in 2021, Georgia released three EPs with them before going independent. There was First Goodbye, her “first time experimenting with recording music”, which chronicled bits of her high school experience and showcased her while developing her vocal and writing styles. There was Chapter 1: Things We’re Not Saying, which Georgia is honored to hear me acknowledge the prefix of – “There was supposed to be a chapter two. I have ADHD, so I kind of got, like, really excited about it, and then I just had another idea.” There was SIGNS, her final release with Sony. And now, after taking on the independent artist life, I’m thrilled to be talking to her about her debut album EVERYTHING MUST GO!

The EVERYTHING MUST GO! album cover, photo by Gracie Hall

And yeah. Georgia commits full send. Her boyfriend goes, her label budget goes, a ton of clothing goes, her old Instagram posts go, and oh yes, smartphones go. This rollout was one of the most entertaining ones I’ve seen in a while. In the modern music industry, the rollout norm consists of endlessly promoting 10-second clips of songs, but Georgia switched it up. Her debut album was instead promoted with colorful imagery, an album-listening party combined with a clothing swap, and an announcement that “I recently made the switch from an @apple iPhone to a @verizon TCL flip phone and I AM NEVER GOING BACK!!!” It turned out, her flip phone was not so practical and has since been ditched, “It takes like 20 minutes just to type out like, ‘Hey, how are you?’” Still, she declares, “I'll probably go back to the flip phone at some point and get, like, a different phone number, and then just have two phones… one for, like, work.” An upcoming geographic transition merely makes a flip phone less appealing at the moment.

“Geographic transition” puts it modestly. Georgia will soon be temporarily relocating from Nashville to France to volunteer at a French hostel. Though surprising, this transition is oddly predictable. Europe shows itself at the end of the EVERYTHING MUST GO! album on “OUTTA SIGHT, OUTTA MIND”, in which she lands in London after going through a breakup in the states. The song lifts that theme into a positive future.

Georgia’s exciting lifestyle combined with the EVERYTHING MUST GO! song title “MANIFESTING A BREAKUP” (see buzzword “manifesting”) makes me wonder where she lies spiritually. Being from Massachusetts, not a far cultural fetch from my hometown of Seattle, she and I both experienced massive shifts upon moving to the south. Georgia experimented with Christianity following the move, but today, supports herself in that realm with things like yoga, meditation, and the acknowledgement that “every time… in the past, that I've stressed about something, it's, like, never been worth stressing about. And ‘spirit’ always has some sort of plan… and it's nothing that I can ever control. So, I'm just like, you know what, ‘spirit’, take the wheel!”

Georgia Webster, photo by Gracie Hall

Being a spiritual woman, while not directly linked, has often gone hand-in-hand with being condescendingly described as “having some whimsy” (a descriptor women have begun to reclaim and embrace in recent decades). The ex-boyfriend quoted in “2 YEARS (ANOTHER GOODBYE)” really doesn’t like “whimsy”. He justifies breaking up with Georgia by saying she’s “too whimsical”, which I find ironic, especially since it’s such an obvious part of Georgia’s image. Isn’t it a key facet of being whimsical that the sky is the limit? What’s “too whimsical” supposed to mean, then?

“Cool” is how I’d describe Georgia, a more accurate adjective considering its subjective meaning. Though Georgia sings in “LA COOL” that she’s not the flashy and “when did humans evolve to be so hot?” cool-girl archetype that the song discusses verbatim, she describes kindness as the ultimate indication of coolness. And this fits; Georgia is incredibly nice. It’s hard to say which one of us says “thank you” to the other’s compliments more times during our conversation.

If we’re defining “cool” subjectively, Georgia’s coolness shouts the most loudly to me when I ask about her musical influences on this record. She talks about surf rock, music with “chill vibes”, Sublime, and MUNA, but she isn’t extremely specific. And perhaps this is the ultimate admirable indication of “going big”. It’s hard to cut what inspires her down to just a couple things. Georgia knows the feeling she wants, and she determines that every aspect of it must go on the record. Listen to EVERYTHING MUST GO! here.