How a shy Davidson girl grew up to become one of Post Malone’s favorite singers
Carter Faith remembers being asked — as a kindergartener at Davidson Elementary School in the small Lake Norman town where she grew up — a simple question:
What do you want to be when you grow up?
She remembers writing down the word “singer.” Then she remembers quickly changing her mind and crossing it out, replacing it with “a vet,” or something like that. Something more practical. More grounded.
Faith did love to sing, but she was a shy kid, and even at a young age, she already sensed that type of career wasn’t something a person from an affluent, intellectually oriented suburb could realistically aspire to. Singing mostly stayed private — inside the family’s River Run home or during car rides with her siblings around Lake Norman.
“‘Well, that’s stupid,’” she recalls thinking as she scratched out the word on the sheet of paper.
Turns out it wasn’t nearly as stupid a dream as she thought.
Twenty years removed from that kindergarten assignment, the now-Nashville-based country singer-songwriter returned to the Charlotte area last Friday night and filled the iconic NoDa concert venue Neighborhood Theatre, the hometown stop of her first-ever headlining tour.
And although Faith is 25 now, at times she seemed to melt back into that tentative little girl as she stood on stage.
“This is crazy for me,” she said at one point between songs, looking out over a crowd of several hundred — including friends and family, but mostly strangers who seemed to hang on every melodic word that came out of her mouth. “I’ve never played a show where people were singing my lyrics back to me. You’re just kind of blowing my mind.”
For a singer who once performed sparsely attended gigs around the Lake Norman area and wondered whether anyone outside her circle of friends would ever hear her music, it was a triumphant, pinch-me moment.
So imagine what it’ll be like when she returns in June to play Bank of America Stadium.
‘Realist and dreamer at the same time’
In Davidson, childhood often unfolded in small, familiar spaces — the town green on a Friday afternoon, kids cutting across Main Street between shops, the bargain bin at The Bird’s Nest record store in downtown, the back seat of a family car on the way to the grocery store.
It was the kind of place where parents trusted their kids to roam downtown in packs, where afternoons stretched a little longer than they were supposed to, and where most days felt predictable in the best possible way.
For Carter Faith, those moments almost always had a soundtrack.
Rascal Flatts’s hit “Backwards,” to which she and her younger brother would gleefully belt out the then-naughty line, “If we could turn it all around and change this C-R-A-P...” Britney Spears’s smash “Lucky,” to which her older sister created a homemade music video with friends. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” a favorite song from the “Rumours” LP she picked up for $1 at The Bird’s Nest.
Faith also remembers an early attempt at performing in front of an audience that involved singing the song “God Help the Outcasts” from “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” at an open mic for kids, through Masterworks School of the Arts in Mooresville. “There were like 10 people there,” she says. “I remember being so nervous to do it. But when I came offstage I was like, ‘I want to do it again.’”
Moments like that revealed something she says has always been embedded in her personality.
“I’ve always been kind of two-brained — realist and dreamer at the same time,” she says. “I was so nervous about it, but I wanted it so bad.”
The dreamer in her, she says, was a “weird, artsy singer girl” who sometimes wished her parents had enrolled her at a place like Northwest School of the Arts, the Charlotte magnet school known for its arts programs. The realist in her, however, attended Cannon School in Concord, one of the region’s most academically demanding private schools. At the time, she wasn’t thrilled about it. “I was so pissed when my parents made me switch schools,” she recalls, with a laugh.
Still, she credits her parents with supporting her musical ambitions — including driving her to open-mic performances as she tried to overcome intense stage fright.
For a while, Faith was really good at keeping her hobby a secret from people at school. Then one day, it got out.
A breakup turned her into a songwriter
Her real name is Carter Jones.
But when she began posting videos of herself singing on YouTube, she used the name Carter Faith — her middle name — partly because she assumed it would make them harder for Cannon classmates to find.
The day she arrived at school to discover that someone had found them, she remembers muttering the F-word under her breath.
“I was embarrassed easy as a kid,” she says. “It was embarrassing to me that I called it ‘Carter Faith,’ instead of ‘Carter Jones,’ which doesn’t make sense in my head anymore. ... I think it just felt so vulnerable and, again — (like succeeding as a singer was) such a pipe dream.”
Overnight, she’d earned the label at school as “the singer.” Realizing it was going to stick, she slowly leaned into it — starting with learning how to play the guitar. She’d also always loved reading and poetry, and had taken to writing her own poems and short stories, in addition to keeping a journal full of her thoughts and feelings and reflections on her life. A lot of the entries, she recalls, were “SO dramatic.”
In fact, it was “a very dramatic high school breakup,” she says, that birthed the first song she ever wrote.
“I was just going through my favorite songs, I guess, that would normally make me feel better,” Faith says. “And none of them were. ... I don’t remember having a thought, like, Oh, I’m gonna try to write a song. I feel like it just happened.”
One of the songs that normally made her feel better was Miranda Lambert’s “Sweet By and By.” But when she put it on that day, she recalls, “the chords felt like what I was feeling like, but the words weren’t hitting me enough. So I took the chords and wrote my own lyrics on it.”
The result was a song she titled “Ghost.”
She tried to pass it off as a new Miranda Lambert song to her parents, just to see what kind of candid feedback she could get from them. In hindsight, she says now, “It’s not the worst song, probably because I was 16. I’m not as embarrassed of it as I could have been.”
Regardless, something about the process hooked her. Although she didn’t get better immediately, she kept at it. Eventually, she was slipping originals into her bar and restaurant performances to go along with her stable of covers.
To this day, she remains her own toughest critic.
“Looking back on them, I’m like, How the hell did I keep doing this, and start writing good ones?”
‘That voice just kept getting louder’
Back in Davidson, circa 2018, the dreamer in her was beating out the realist.
As graduation in June of that year approached, she announced that she planned to move to Nashville in the fall to attend a songwriting program at Belmont University — and she remembers everyone having the same reaction: What??
“‘You’re gonna go to school for songwriting? What was the point of being here?’” Faith remembers people asking her. “All my friends were going to UVA, or Chapel Hill, Duke, and I was like, ‘Iiiii’m gonna goooo learn how to be a songwriter.’ It was just a weird echo chamber (at Cannon).”
There, most people were aiming for a very traditional success track: elite college; prestigious job; conventional career. She respected that path — but she had this internal voice saying: I don’t think I want the same life as everyone around me.
“That voice,” she says, “just kept getting louder in my head.”
The outsider feeling that once seemed like a curse instead became fuel.
“That’s probably what pushed me to want to do this,” she says. “I don’t know if I would have had the nerve to move to Nashville and to try to be a country singer-songwriter if I didn’t have that feeling, like, Oh my God, I really don’t fit in all the time. ... If I maybe went somewhere else for school, or felt comfortable and felt related to, that I might have been like, Okay, this can be my life. ...
“I think there’s a lot of times in life where (if you’re comfortable) you never make the leap to go be where you’re supposed to be.”
In other words, Faith says, if she had felt like she fit in — particularly within the academic and social culture at Cannon — she might have just stayed in that world and taken a more traditional path.
But because she didn’t, she was pushed to try something riskier. And the gamble would begin to pay off sooner than she ever expected.
2025: a very good year for Carter Faith
Faith thinks “that Cannon/Davidson mentality” may have pushed her to make things happen quickly in Nashville.
“I was like, I’m hitting the ground running,” she recalls. “I am going to reach out to anyone, meet with anyone who will talk to me, write with anyone who will write with me.” Within a year of arriving in town, she had made meaningful connections along Music Row, which is known as the historic heart of the country music industry.
By the time she graduated — early, in December 2021 — she’d independently released her debut EP. Just a few months later, in March 2022, she signed her first global publishing deal, with Universal Music.
But 2025 was her breakout year.
In the spring, she wrote a song as an ode to the actor Billy Bob Thornton, who was riding a fresh wave of popularity thanks to the hit TV show “Landman.” And after the song found its way to him, he texted her to say he liked it, leading to a friendship and business partnership that saw him starring in the music video for her song “Bar Star.” She also would wind up co-writing a song that made it onto an album connected to “Landman.”
2025 also marked the release her debut album, “Cherry Valley”; a collaboration with “The Tonight Show’s” Jimmy Fallon on the holiday song “Ugly Sweater,” for his Christmas album; and her first film-acting gig, having been cast — fittingly — as a country-music singer in the upcoming Netflix thriller “Heartland” (the movie, starring Jessica Chastain, was shot in Atlanta last fall).
Then she capped her monumental year with a direct message on Instagram from Post Malone:
“‘Bar Star.’ Stud,” he wrote, as a compliment to her playful, old-school country song. “It’s my favorite song right now.”
Two weeks later, he invited Faith to open for him and Jelly Roll as part of their “Big Ass Stadium Tour Part 2,” which will stop June 9 at Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium and introduce her to more than 1 million prospective new fans over its 3½-month run.
“When you grow up wanting to do this, or when you decide you want to do this,” she says, “that is the dream: to play those bigger shows.”
But at the much smaller Neighborhood Theatre last week, the moment felt just as meaningful.
As she looked out at the hometown crowd at the end of her show — a room full of people who, not all that long ago, might have been the same kids roaming Main Street or gathering on the green — friends, family members and fans roared in approval of her decision to take the leap of faith she made at the end of high school.
Tears welled in her eyes.
“OK, this is embarrassing. I’m gonna go,” she said, dabbing at her eye with her left hand. “I love you. I’m Carter Faith.”
Then she stepped off the stage, walked down the stairs and disappeared into the darkness — leaving behind a hometown crowd still cheering loudly for the girl from Davidson who once crossed the word “singer” off a kindergarten assignment.
