Audrey Hobert is standing on a chair, wearing Groucho glasses and an enormous trench coat and faux-strumming a banjo. She looks 10 feet tall. She moves across the stage as if dancing alone in her bedroom, and she sings every song in her catalog and then plays her biggest hit, Sue Me, one more time, bouncing on an exercise trampoline and telling the crowd to put away their phones. After 45 minutes, she vanishes. The house lights come on. I wish I could exit my body and watch my show, the 27-year-old singer says a week before her three-night run in Brooklyn. Today she's wearing a normal-sized trench coat and clutching a book about Elizabeth Holmes. She's been on the road since December, and within 10 months, she went from playing for 650 fans at the Music Hall of Williamsburg to three sold-out nights at the Brooklyn Paramount. In the year since the release of her debut album, Who's the Clown?, Hobert has become one of pop's most electrifying new acts. Her lyrics are equal parts confessional and funny - she sings of rating Uber drivers, sleeping with exes and taking naughty mirror selfies - and her fast-talking, conversational style has drawn comparisons to early Taylor Swift. Popular on Variety Naturally, her music is also reminiscent of her childhood friend and collaborator Gracie Abrams, though Hobert's sound has more of an edge. After both attended college in New York, they moved in together in Los Angeles. Abrams was working on her debut album while Hobert, an aspiring screenwriter, was staffed on a Nickelodeon show. I never intended to become a songwriter, she says. One night it all changed. Gracie's cousin came over and was telling us a story and said something that we both found funny, Hobert recalls. We repeated it to each other in song, and then sat down that day and wrote a song for fun. Then we just kept playing it. Soon, Hobert was a credited writer on half of Abrams' sophomore album, The Secret of Us, a massive breakout hit that sent Abrams on a year-long world tour and left Hobert to her own devices. It wasn't on my mind to sneak off and do this alone, H #variety #podcastdailynews