Carter Faith is smiling sweetly, but she’s wearing murder weapons on her feet.
They’re not visible beneath our table here at Skinny Dennis, a honky-tonk not far from Faith’s Nashville house, but she’s wearing them, for sure — a pair of black stiletto pumps with a set of real metal spurs attached to the back that are meant for fashion, not crimes. But hey, if the wrong guy comes along, like he does in the music video for her song “Pearl Handled Pistol”? It’s good to know you’re prepared.
“I’ve always liked confusing people and making them uncomfortable,” Faith says, tucked in a booth in a black t-shirt, jeans, and her Spurlettos, as she’s named them. Faith, alongside her stylist Kennady and creative director Lily, designed them for the video, in which she’s wearing a pair covered in blood near a dead body (we don’t see any actual murdering, but you do the math). The shoes, like Faith’s music, are beautiful, but they’ll cut you if you’re not careful. “I know I’m a blonde Southern girl and I like doing my makeup and stuff,” she says, “but, deep down, I’m like an angry old man.”
That slight sense of unease, coupled with Faith’s crystalline country voice and boundary-pushing songwriting, is at the core of her record Cherry Valley (and the recent deluxe version, Cherry Valley Forever). She’s as much Patsy Cline as she is David Lynch, with songs that aren’t at all afraid to broach taboo topics like mental health, sex, and drugs and pack it all into an imagined concept-album dreamland, wrapping the pain and poison in ribbons and lace. Taking the second spot on Rolling Stone’s Best Country Albums list last year, it’s one of the strongest, most assured debuts the genre has seen of late, earning her an ACM Awards nomination for Album of the Year. The only other debut album to nab the same honors in the past decade was Chris Stapleton, with Traveller. Now, she’s a solid contender for a Best Contemporary Country Album nominee at the Grammys, and up for a CMA Award, too.
Faith has been just as busy on the road. In the year that followed the release of Cherry Valley, she opened for Stapleton, Kacey Musgraves, Shaboozey, and Post Malone. And, next month, she’ll make her acting debut in Netflix’s Heartland, alongside Jessica Chastain and Jennifer Nettles, playing a young country artist who mysteriously disappears. It’s her first on-screen acting role, and her first audition, too. Faith has achieved all of this in a town where the most boundary-pushing, visionary works and artists aren’t always the ones most celebrated on Music Row.
“I honestly think that’s one of the most exciting things about Carter and how this music has connected,” says her close friend and producer, Topher Brown, who has seen his share of young artists get distracted by what might work best on social media, or a desire to please the powers that be. “She is truly writing because she feels what she feels.” Faith describes it, primarily, as her gospel of “no fucks given.”
Not giving a fuck is what got Faith to Cherry Valley. Born in Davidson, North Carolina, Faith was an anxious, self-described shy kid. “I remember if I had to come late to school because I had to go to the dentist or something, that would be the end of the world for me,” she says.
Faith loved country music from an early age, thanks to the tapes her grandfather would play in the car. She loved to sing, and taught herself piano and guitar, but being an artist was an unserious job compared to the more practical goals of her classmates, who were often looking toward traditional careers propelled by elite college degrees. She moved to Nashville anyway, enrolling at Belmont University to study songwriting, graduating in 2021. Songs like 2022’s “Greener Pasture” placed her in the “next big thing” artist category around town. Which is where she stayed for the next few years. Sometimes it’s a tag she can’t escape. “That’s a whole different conversation,” Faith says with a laugh.
It was “Greener Pasture” that got the attention of Bon Iver, who was looking for an artist to add vocals to his song “Awards Season” from the album SABLE, fABLE. He cold-called Faith while she was sitting in a coffee shop to make the ask. “I guess it gave me a sense of validation that someone so cool thought my music was good,” Faith says. “And on just a really simple level, it made me feel good and gave me some gumption to keep on, because there’s so many times where you’re like, ‘Fuck this. I’m going to make like Bobbie Gentry and get out of here.’”
She didn’t, though. At least not yet. She and Brown began crafting the songs that would become Cherry Valley around 2022, recording two years later. A drive through the town of Cherry Valley, Tennessee, inspired the idea of a concept record, where the songs are part of a visual and sonic world where hearts are broken, people let you down, and sex, drugs, and country music keep you going. Still, they feel achingly personal: “if only I could settle the chemicals running in my brain,” Faith sings on the stunning “If I Had Never Lost My Mind,” “I could be happy, and you could have stayed.” For Faith, keeping her work so vulnerable, even in the discomfort, is about “not filtering myself. In this town, or this industry.”
Carter Faith, in her “Spurlettos.” Photo: Lily Nelson*
CHERRY VALLEY DIDN’T ALWAYS GET A POSITIVE reaction. When she played some folks in Nashville her song “Misery Loves Company,” with the lyric “birds are circling, something must have died,” they told her it was a little too “aggressive,” she says. “And my personality is like, ‘OK, fuck you then! Whatever.”
Brown sees Faith’s ability to stay so true to her vision as one of “a million things” that sets her apart. “It’s her true knowledge of who she is,” the producer says. “A lot of these young artists are so sensitive and impressionable by songwriters that have clout, but Carter’s always known what she wants to say.”
Part of her vision is that juxtaposition of elements, and leaning into making her audience feel that sense of discomfort. Faith has explored that thoroughly in her music videos, like “Bar Star,” where she cozies up to actor Billy Bob Thorton (“bless his liver and his honky-tonk heart,” she sings brilliantly), or “Pearl Handled Pistol,” where she possibly commits a murder in those spurred stilettos alongside Laci Kaye Booth and Baby Nova.
Due to some revealing wardrobe choices, the three women got their share of “slut-shaming” comments on social media. “It’s definitely not going to make me want to cover up, if that was your goal,” Faith says. She points to artists like the Chicks as the epitome of women whose mere existence makes people uncomfortable, and who maybe the industry always wanted to find a way to silence.
“That’s kind of happening now, I feel like,” Faith says. “There are a lot of really successful women, so everyone is like ‘oh good, this opens up doors for women.’ I don’t really feel like much has changed here. There’s still only a certain amount of spots, and you have to be so much better than a man, obviously. We want to empower our daughters, but not our women.”
She thinks of another one of her core influences, Lana Del Rey, and the arc of her career: especially her first performance on Saturday Night Live, which came with a gleeful handful of ridicule. When Faith appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, she wore a lace white dress partly inspired by the one Del Rey chose for that infamous appearance. “It felt like a cornerstone of my life watching pop culture,” she says, seeing an artist she adored torn apart in real time. “[Her performance] was beautiful, and it was real.”
Faith, clearly, doesn’t gravitate to artists who mute or censor themselves (tourmate Musgraves is another big inspiration). She, too, wants everyone to feel welcome at her shows — which is part of why she dropped off of the lineup for Kid Rock’s Rock the Country Festival. “When I looked out at the audience of my last club shows, I could see every type of person,” she says. “And that made me feel really good. Because I wrote [these songs] as a white, blonde, straight girl from the south. But you go to different places and there are people who resonate with my story in their life, and that’s really, really cool because music has done that for me. I don’t know if country does that all the time for people.” (She has a name for the kind of country music that exists as light radio fluff, intended to piss off no one: “pander city.”)
That audience is about to grow exponentially, when Heartland begins streaming Nov. 13 on Netflix. Though Faith always loved Broadway and has dreams of playing Roxie Heart in Chicago, she wasn’t outwardly looking for film roles. When the script landed on her desk, she figured why not give it a try. “It would be fun,” Faith thought. “And it would make me nervous. I kind of like doing things that make me nervous.” She had a feeling that she landed the job right away, and she was right.
Faith didn’t sign up for acting lessons, instead taking the advice from director Shana Feste (Country Strong), who actually discouraged her from doing so. “She explained that you have all these colors or tools in your toolbox from your life and your emotional experiences and then you use them to act,” Faith says.
The biggest agenda item for Faith right now, though, is finishing her next album, which is about halfway done. The songs from Cherry Valley Deluxe, like “Pearl Handled Pistol” and the Wyatt Flores duet “Nothin’ Better to Do,” serve almost as a transition point .
“I feel like Cherry Valley was very technicolor and candy-coated,” she says. “And this is almost like when you’re extremely full glam and it takes like 18 makeup wipes to take it off. This is the first makeup wipe. Taking one layer back. That’s kind of how I envisioned it in my head.”
Cherry Valley was character-driven, but what she’s writing now is more raw. “It’s just me, not different people for every song,” Faith says. She hopes people like it, but she’s not asking for opinions.
“I heard a quote once that said, ‘The way to kill good art is ask 10 people what they think about it,’ and I think that’s true,” Faith says, standing up in her spurred stilettos (a few weeks later, a pair arrives in the mail with a note that cautions the wearer to be careful when taking them through TSA). “I just remind myself that this could all go away, so I hope I did it the way I want to.”
