Audrey Hobert is wildly funny on debut ‘Who’s the Clown?’ : NPR

The opening track of Audrey Hobert’s debut album came to the 26-year-old when she was sitting at home on a Friday night, watching a documentary about Steve Martin.

She had just finished writing a few songs with her childhood friend Gracie Abrams — several of which would end up climbing Billboard‘s Hot 100 chart and turning Abrams into a Gen Z pop sensation — and Hobert was trying to figure out what her next move would be. She’d recently worked as a staff writer on two seasons of the Nickelodeon show The Really Loud House, a comedy about a preteen boy navigating life with 10 sisters. The songwriting stint had been new and exciting, but Hobert didn’t really consider herself an artist yet. Then she turned on the Apple TV+ doc STEVE! (martin) – a documentary in two pieces and found inspiration in the white suit-wearing, banjo-carrying comedian she watched as a kid.

“I noticed that his whole career and life fell into place once he decided to just be himself on stage completely,” Hobert tells NPR. “So I picked up my banjo guitar. I was at the time writing a one-woman show because I was still unsure of like, what am I going to do? I started writing the song because I was like, ‘How would I open my one woman show?’ “

The result, “I Like To Touch People,” is a hilarious, whimsical tune about making small talk at a party, having a people-pleasing mom and — well, touching people (figuratively, sure, but also maybe physically?). It sets the tone for Who’s the Clown?, a bubblegum pop album with goofy yet vulnerable lyrics that make Hobert an instantly endearing narrator. “I’m taking thirst traps in the mirror in my room,” she sings in one track over an unrelentingly upbeat melody. “I think I look bad, so I take a hundred.”

Over Wheatus-like guitars and drum machines, Who’s the Clown? — out on Aug. 15 via RCA Records and produced by newcomer-slash-Finneas-protege Ricky Gourmet — establishes Hobert as an unconventional new voice in pop. The album’s stream-of-consciousness writing plays less like what you’d find on a major label release and more like an unfiltered voice memo from your most optimistic friend (even after she’s just had the worst day of her life). In “Don’t Go Back to His Ass,” Hobert delivers instructions for staying away from a toxic boyfriend via folk harmonies. In the song “Chateau,” she micro-doses psychedelic mushrooms before going to an industry party where everyone is trying too hard to be cool, which Hobert clocks automatically as lame. The music video for “Wet Hair,” a lackadaisical song about not getting a blowout before meeting up with an ex to prove a point, has the DIY quality of something a tween would make on the family computer when left home alone in middle school.

“I think what I really want to do more than anything is make an audience laugh,” Hobert says over Zoom, calling from the same kitchen in which she lipsyncs with a wooden spoon for the “Wet Hair” video. “I do move through the world with a sense of humor at the forefront of everything. I think it’s like a survival method. I also think it’s a more fun way to be and to live.”

That sentiment is shared by many of Hobert’s pop peers right now — think Sabrina, Chappell, Olivia and Reneé — but Audrey’s clownery feels distinctly and delightfully down-to-earth. It’s less polished than that of her theater and Disney-trained comrades (though she is a dancer and theater aficionado raised by a sitcom writer), and more blunt. The butt of the joke, oftentimes, is the ruthless honesty with which she overshares to anyone who will listen — a friend, an Uber driver, God — and the way she can pack so many words and feelings into a line. As a listener, it often feels like you’re playing catchup, laughing a beat behind while she’s moved on to her next epiphany. Hobert’s off-screen sensibility (she studied screenwriting at New York University) gives her the eccentric, self-assured charm of someone who has not been told how to carefully curate a commercial brand or image, and instead chose to pose for her debut album cover in slightly mismatched socks and Dansko clogs.

But, she admits, it took her a minute to figure out she had a pop album in her to begin with. The Nickelodeon show she’d been working on got canceled. Thanks to her collaboration with Abrams — which Hobert describes as “something fun to do with my best friend” — she’d signed a publishing deal. She spent months in sessions with producers and musicians, trying to write lyrics for other people. It just wasn’t working.

“I really admire songwriters who can get thrown in with whoever and make an amazing song. I am not that kind of writer,” Hobert says. “I think that’s why it worked so well with Gracie was because we knew each other so well and the context was all there.”

Together, they crafted songs like “That’s So True” — Abrams’ biggest hit to date — and “I Love You, I’m Sorry,” which Hobert also directed the music video for. Both of these tracks feature some of Abrams’ wittiest lyricism to date. In a VEVO short film about the making of her album, The Secret of Us, Abrams said Hobert often pushed her to “scream the first thing that comes to mind” while they were writing together. “This is a good example of [your] best friend enabling you to have complete freedom and space to say anything that comes to mind,” Abrams said.

Writing on her own, Hobert went pedal to the metal on that method, resulting in songs she felt were mostly too personal for a stranger to sing (though she briefly thought Halsey might be up to the task). Eventually, she came clean to her publisher that she’d written material she wanted to turn into an album. She enlisted Gourmet, who’d been similarly working the session circuit and with whom she felt a real connection, to do it with her.

In May, the single “Sue Me” arrived with a splash and a self-directed music video, featuring a montage of Hobert dancing ecstatically by herself and with Gourmet while a clown sits in the corner, ignoring them. The early Kesha-esque confessional about hooking up with an ex who looks amazing in his Amazon Basics went viral, racking up more than 23 million Spotify streams to date. Hobert quickly sold out shows in New York City, London and Los Angeles. Listeners latched on to her hyperspecific lyricism and dance-like-no-one’s-watching demeanor.

But Who’s the Clown? isn’t all carefree punchlines. On songs like “Sex and the City” and “Phoebe,” Hobert turns cheeky pop culture references into sentimental introspection. The latter she wrote while watching Friends for the first time. She says she quickly identified with Phoebe Buffay, the Lisa Kudrow character who offers much of the show’s comic relief. But Phoebe, she notes, is the only one who’s not pursued romantically within the friend group.

“Why doesn’t any of those three main dudes want to be with her? It makes no sense to me,” Hobert explains. “And I’ve just always felt that way a little bit. I really wanted to write a song about not feeling physically worthy or very beautiful for most of my life, and then I got to connect it to that character.”

In the song, she grapples with insecurity until she can own her beauty. “Cause why else would you want me? I think I’ve got a f***** up face,” Hobert sings. “And that thought used to haunt me, ’til I fell in its sweet embrace.”

(Phoebe, for the record, ends up marrying a charming character played by universal heartthrob Paul Rudd — Hobert hasn’t made it that far into the show yet.)

At a time when social media platforms like TikTok constantly serve young women micro-trend aesthetics and personality labels to commodify themselves into — “tomato girl,” “clean girl,” “Pilates princess” — Hobert offers something different: a kind of cool that can only come from being yourself, even when it’s messy and confusing and maybe a little embarrassing. Her press photos, for example, include a shot of her on her hands and knees outside Hollywood’s Chinese Theatre. To launch her website, she posted a photo on Instagram wearing a fedora and holding a wooden pipe. Her online presence feels intentionally cringe and avant-garde at once, blurring the line between what’s a bit and what’s sincere. It feels less like marketing and more like an artist who knows she’s fun and sexy even when she’s wearing sensible shoes. She gets called “quirky” in a lot of label meetings, she says, and she’s fine with that.

When asked if she thinks of her comedic performance streak as subversive, a la Pee-wee Herman, Hobert gasps and holds up her phone to show off the background: a photo of Pee-wee, the fictional children’s TV character originally developed by Paul Reubens for the Los Angeles improv troupe The Groundlings. “Performance art is the most interesting thing to me, honestly,” Hobert says. “To be completely earnest and to also maybe make people have a hard time telling if you’re being serious or not.”

Who’s the Clown? is a one-woman show of sorts, a peek into Hobert’s colorful, wacky world. But it’s just a taste of what’s to come. When asked if writing for television is now on the backburner, Hobert doesn’t hesitate.

“I plan to do it all. Right now, this is my whole entire life — songwriting and this album. Every fiber of my being is this right now,” she says. “But I feel like I love television and I love movies equally. And theater, oh my God. Theater specifically! I have big, big aspirations. And I plan to do it all.”