Audrey Hobert Is Always In On The Joke

Following the release of her debut album, Who’s The Clown?, the breakout artist talks listening to her own music, songwriting, and her birthday.

By Cam Delisle

Published on September 9, 2025

The first song that Audrey Hobert wrote for her debut album Who’s the Clown? was “Wet Hair,” a track that calls back to the golden era of 2000s singer-songwriters who knew how to make self-sabotage sound sweet, a little silly, and weirdly comforting. Fitting, then, that when we meet over Zoom, Hobert is sitting in her kitchen with her hair still damp and loosely piled on her head—not to sell relatability, but because this is literally her morning and she probably just got out of the shower.

Hobert is endearing in the same way that her music is—candid, gently self-deprecating, and always delivering the punchline like she didn’t just write the setup. She got her start in the writers’ room of Nickelodeon’s The Really Loud House, but her sharpest lines landed elsewhere—namely in the diaristic pop of her childhood friend (and Taylor Swift mentee) Gracie Abrams. She’s since notched credits on some of Abrams’ most streaming-devoured tracks, including the US Top 10 hit, “That’s So True.”

Where Hobert really comes into focus is in her own material—even if her fingerprints are all over Abrams’ latest, The Secret of Us. Her songwriting is hyper-specific, idiosyncratic, and occasionally borderline unrelatable—but that’s exactly where its charm lives. “Thirst Trap” documents the mild existential crisis of taking nudes, capped off with a celebratory saxophone solo, while “Bowling alley” invents a push-pull FOMO narrative and sells it like a memory. Literally who else is saying “He’s heating up and eating up a pizza pocket / I wanted one, but he forgot it” in a pop song?

RANGE caught up with Audrey to unpack her songwriting process and the surprisingly tricky task of living with your own songs.

You mentioned that you’ve listened to “Sue Me” nearly 400 times. How important is it for you that you enjoy listening to your own music?

Oh, I have to. If I don’t love it, I’m not continuing it. When I was much younger I used to think, and I’m sure a lot of people have this, but I would be like “If I think it’s good… it’s objectively good.” Obviously I don’t know if that’s true, but I definitely only kept writing something while making Who’s The Clown? if I liked it, and if I didn’t like it, I would just work on it until I did. I love when a song feels addicting.

Currently, what’re your top three favourites on your album?

Weirdly, I could not have expected it less, but “Chateau” is doing pretty well, which was never really one that I listened to a lot. So definitely that, I love “Sex and the city” always, and “Drive” has always been my number one.

Your lyricism and melodies are like stims for me, do you experience this as well? Your own music getting stuck in your head?

Yes! Especially when I was writing it, that was always an indicator that it was working. I’ve taken a serious break from listening to my own music now, though. There was a period of time where I felt like I could listen and every time felt like the first time, but that feeling has passed for me now, unfortunately.

You have a background in screenwriting, and mentioned that it takes you quite a while to complete an entire song. Do you think that those two things are related?

It definitely could be, subconsciously. I’m no stranger to taking my time with a piece of writing, and I don’t really need the instant gratification of finishing something. I never expect to finish an entire song in a day when I sit down to write, like, it’s not even a standard that I have for myself.

It can take me eight hours to write the first verse of a song, and then naturally, I’m exhausted by the end of the day. So I always figure that it’s in my best interest to sleep on it, wake up, listen again, and then naturally my gears start turning. The fastest song that I wrote was “Don’t go back to his ass,” I had that chorus months before I finished the whole song, and once I sat down, I finished the rest of the song in one day.

What song took the longest for you to write?

There were a few songs that I started writing and didn’t end up finishing for months. “Phoebe” is one of them. I wrote the first verse and it took me almost three months to finish it. “Shooting star” also took me a long time, same with “Silver Jubilee.” When I say long time, though, I mean like, those were the ones I remember sitting down with most often and only getting two lines in a day, or sitting down for hours and getting nothing at all.

How long did it take you to make the album from start to finish?

I finished “Wet Hair” in April 2024, and that was the first song that I wrote and finished for the record. I think that I finished the last song in December? So I’d say about eight months.

Did your relationship with the music change from December to when you released it?

I would say that I slowly listened to it less. Now that it’s been out for a week, I’m definitely having that feeling that a lot of artists talk about which is that when you put it out, it’s no longer yours. Over this past weekend I started to feel the crash of it no longer being a secret, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just the reality of it, I guess.

It’s been a while since I sat down and really wrote a song, especially in the way that I hunkered down and did for eight months. So I’m definitely starting to feel like, “Oh, I wanna do that again.”

“Silver Jubilee” is about getting older. Do you like your birthday?

I actually do, I like February, I like winter. I used to cry every birthday, but the last few I’ve stopped crying because of this quality that my mom has. She just loves her birthday, accepts the love, doesn’t get sad about getting older, and isn’t disappointed that she didn’t get enough attention or anything, so, I’m striving to be that way.