Last year I shocked myself by enjoying a few songs by JJ Abrams’ daughter, Gracie Abrams, who is a pop singer trapped in the Khia asylum. I think of her as one of Taylor Swift’s many children, singers of sad songs about mean men and what it feels like to be perpetually 26. After not enjoying Abrams’ new album Daughter From Hell as much as songs like “That’s So True” and “I Love You, I’m Sorry,” I realized that this was because she wasn’t working with her longtime collaborator Audrey Hobert anymore.
Once you listen to Hobert’s album, Who’s The Clown, you hear her signature styles all over the songs she’s co-written. She loves these bouncy little melodies, and she has a pop punk-ish tendency to end each line with a little “woah-oh.” She’s a wordy songwriter, and she uses her language to create a percussiveness on top of the melody. The bridge in “I Love You, I’m Sorry” is a great example of this, where Abrams releases a flurry of unsaid admissions to her ex (“you were the best, but you were the worst, as sick as it sounds I loved you first”). Untethered from Abrams’ preciousness and penchant for melodrama, Hobert reveals herself to be a very funny songwriter and a powerful storyteller.
When describing this album to a friend, I said that it gave me all the feelings that Swifties get when they listen to Taylor. I have never so acutely felt like a songwriter was reading my diary—at least not since I was a teenager listening to Rilo Kiley in my bedroom. She crams every verse with as many details as she possibly can, deepening their specificity. But they don’t feel like these scenarios are ripped from her diary. They’re little stories, slices of life that you might have experienced too. It wasn’t too surprising to learn she has a background in television writing.
Take, for instance, the scene Hobert sets in the song “Sex in the City,” a song where she wistfully imagines what it might be like to be Carrie Bradshaw, a person who wears fabulous clothes and has tons of sex.
“The seat is up, the place is haunted,” she sings about a random hookup. “He's heating up and eating up a pizza pocket. I wanted one, but he forgot it. He's off his meds and he's an artist.”
I have been in that haunted apartment. I have made this exact mistake! There’s something about the girl failure nature of these songs that really has its hooks in me. Sometimes I get a little worried about the character in Hobert’s songs—that girl drinks a lot. But it never gets dour. Hobert has a sense of humor about everything, even things that are depressing. In the album’s opener, the very funny “I Like To Touch People,” she sings, “I grew up with a people pleasing mother, so now I have problems.” Girl, same.
Victimhood isn’t something that Hobert is much interested in exploring, unlike many of her women singer songwriter contemporaries. Her songs have a more interesting tension in them: can you have everything you want and not let it change you?
The character that Hobert creates on Who’s The Clown is awkward and very aware of her flaws. In fact, she’s always drinking and smoking weed to regulate her emotions—after agonizing over a crush, she’s “4/20, so vacant tanning on the roof.” It never veers into “You Belong With Me” territory; she is writing songs from the persona of a fully adult woman for whom high school is a distant memory. Hobert never really lashes out at the world for her insecurities. She tries to embrace them. The most interesting love story on this album is with herself.
Unlike Gracie Abrams’ work, I don’t really know what a teenager would get out of this pop album, but it really speaks to me. It’s mostly about being a huge fuck up—wanting to chase your dreams but not being able to put away laundry. “Bowling Alley” is all about not being able to decide if you want to go out or stay in. “It doesn’t need to be about me all the time,” she sings. “But I’ll be honest, the bowling alley felt nice.”
I think these themes—failure, embracing yourself despite it—are best expressed on “Phoebe,” the penultimate track. It’s certainly the most blunt about it. Hobert layers a couple of different ideas on top of each other. She moves to New York because she wants to be a star, but she gets her heart broken and her confidence shattered. This character is white-knuckling through reality, trying to convince herself that staying in and watching Friends is still satisfying to her. She wants to still believe she can make it, because that idea has become a load-bearing pillar for her mental health.
“Why else would he want me?” she sings in the chorus. “I think I’ve got a fucked up face.”
This song knocked the wind out of me when I first heard it. I did also move to New York to be a star, and that road has been very difficult for me. I feel like in a lot of ways, trying to achieve my dreams has made me really crazy. I don’t know what else I have to offer the world other than being a really good writer at this point. I kind of put all my points into that skill—too late to start over.
Hobert doesn’t leave us there, though. Her songs give you that little shot of cathartic release you get from a good television show.
“That thought used to haunt me, until I fell in its warm embrace,” she continues in the chorus. “Now I don’t sweat the acne. It’s a pain, but it goes away.”
My favorite lyric, though, is on the album’s closer, “Silver Jubilee.”
“I wanna make it,” she sings. “But it’s fun to be a normal girl.”
