Leah Lu
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Kyle Berger* Audrey Hobert doesn’t want to be in on the joke. If the saying goes, “We’re not laughing at you, we’re laughing with you,” the 26-year-old singer-songwriter is on a whole other level: We’re laughing, and she’s watching from above, smugly brushing her hands off, looking at all she’s made.
Much has been said about Hobert’s music since she showed up on the scene less than two years ago: It’s self-referential, confessional, stream-of-consciousness, relatable. And she’s told her come-up story enough times to have the SparkNotes version of the script “down pat.” It goes something like this: As a child, she loved pop music and was a dancer — “I felt rhythm in my bones from a young age” — but in high school, she decided that being a writer was actually cooler. “Even though I felt like a performer, I more so felt like I wanted to be the person who was building the world that people would perform,” she recalls. So she studied dramatic writing at NYU Tisch, graduated, started working a staff writing job at Nickelodeon, and moved in with a childhood friend, who just so happened to be Gracie Abrams (maybe you’ve heard of her?).
They’d been roommates for about six months when they tried writing a song together. “It was not preconceived,” Hobert says. “We barely knew what was happening while it was happening.”
One of the songs they co-wrote was Abrams’ most-streamed single, “That’s So True,” with 1.6 billion and counting on Spotify. It’s got Hobert’s fingerprints all over it: a fast-strummed guitar, lyrics falling out at a breakneck pace, and confusion mingled with self-aware humor.
Thanks to a nudge from Abrams, Hobert signed a baseline publishing deal to ensure she was compensated properly. Around the same time, the Nickelodeon show she worked for was cancelled. Though she’d never set out to head down the songwriting path, Hobert started showing up to sessions with other artists, a transitional time that lasted about four months. “I kind of never left one of those sessions and felt good about the song,” she says. “I started to write by myself. And then when I started writing by myself, I found it allowed me to think on one sentence for as long as I wanted, which was sometimes up to eight hours.”
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Some might say those head-down, solitary spells catapulted Hobert into a genuine flow state. They also equipped her with a sense of possessiveness over her stories. It started with “Wet Hair,” the first song she wrote for what ended up being her debut album, Who’s The Clown? “I did have the thought that maybe someone else would sing this, and I was like, ‘Yeah, sure. I don’t know.’ Then three songs later I wrote ‘Sex and the City.’ And when I wrote that song, I thought, ‘No, no, I will sing this song,’” she says. Musically, she’s sturdy in the principles, as a musical theater geek, film lover, and avid lifelong consumer of pop music. “I remember having the active thought very early on that there are no rules. I have such an innate knowledge of pop music because I’ve been studying it without realizing it all my life.”
In “Sex and the City,” our narrator grapples with the discrepancies between what she’s been told the thrill of young adulthood should look like, and the vacant disappointment it often turns out to yield instead. Alone in her room, she drags herself to the bar with nonchalance, an “If I act like I don’t care, maybe it’ll happen” type of chillness. She does end up going home with a guy — “I guess there’s a God,” she sings, but then reality sinks in. He heats up a pizza pocket for just himself, is a self-proclaimed artist off his meds, has no headboard, leaves the toilet seat up. “If this is it, then what is it all for?” she sings. The song is a three-minute study in the lengths we go to feel desired, even for one night.
It’s a fictional story, Hobert says, but if you’ve been there before, listening to the track is less a walk down memory lane and more so a viscerally skin-crawling flashback. It’s a skill that she’s mastered just one album in, if only because honing in on a very specific strain of discomfort is second nature to Hobert. “Something that I’ve always been told is that I have a perspective,” she says, mentioning that even in college writing classes, teachers said she “never had any issues with personal voice.” “It never felt like I was discovering something new about myself as I was writing these songs or that I was wearing my heart on my sleeve,” she says. “I never wiped a tear when I wrote a line. I was just really trying to hone my craft.”
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In nearly all of her songs, Hobert seems to be performing for some ambiguous voyeur, exhibiting what’s often deemed to be “main character syndrome” or a symptom of the Internet telling you to “romanticize your life.” The nuance is that she’s meta about it: Because she’s aware there’s an audience, she’s poised to shut down any potential judgment by acknowledging it first, beating you to the punchline. She makes music for maladaptive daydreamers, movie soundtrack bops for the girls who got their escapist tendencies from listening to Kelly Clarkson’s “Breakaway” too much in 2004. If it was easy enough to boil young adulthood down to a linear timeline, Who’s The Clown? would land precisely on the volatile soft spot between naive ennui and maturity.
That tension is most clearly realized on the album’s standout, “Bowling Alley,” a vivid scene of the internal dialogue of whether to go out to a party or stay in, as if the world’s fate hinges on that single decision. Turns out, nobody really noticed that she showed up at all. On “Chateau,” which opens with a sunshine-y percussion-only intro that you wouldn’t be blamed for initially clocking as Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten,” Hobert is skeptically grimacing at a star-studded Los Angeles rendezvous. “Are we legally bound to stand in this circle lookin’ around?” she asks. “Thirst Trap,” a song about being humiliatingly, debilitatingly obsessed with a crush, ends with a triumphant sax solo, hilariously timed given the song’s head-in-your-hands pathetic sentiment.
Who’s The Clown? carries a steady, upbeat jauntiness throughout its 12-song tracklist, reflecting Hobert’s rebellion against a certain trope that’s been bestowed upon this generation of female Gen Z singer-songwriters. “Writing that first album, I had such a gripe with ‘Woe is me.’ I just felt more embarrassed to express a ‘Woe is me’ thought than I did to express, ‘I feel like my face is ugly,’” Hobert says. “They’re both kind of ‘Woe is me,’ but I just remember being like, ‘OK, if I’m going to express a grievance, I need to turn it around for myself.'”
Hobert looks to songwriters who take the listener on unexpected journeys, melodically and lyrically: SZA, Taylor Swift, MJ Lenderman. “I think he is writing pop hooks,” she says about the North Carolina indie-rock wunderkind, citing his dry lyricism and “anthemic” melodies. “My favorite feeling with a songwriter, and I feel this with Taylor, is that they don’t make me feel like I want to sit down and write a song like them,” she adds. “They make me feel like I can sit down and write a song like me.”
When we speak, Hobert is in the middle of a European tour, so she hasn’t been too focused on making new music quite yet. “I’ve been really excited to start writing again,” she says, “because I do not feel beholden to making four more ‘Sue Me’s and six more ‘Thirst Trap’s or whatever. Whatever it is that I’m going to make next time, I know that my melodic and my structural sensibilities live so deeply in pop that whatever I want to say, hopefully it works.”
