As the singer-songwriter Audrey Hobert descended into the Gutter, a Lower East Side bowling alley, the other day, she shared a confession. One of the singles on her album, “Who’s the Clown?,” is called “Bowling alley,” but that was largely incidental. “I see all these people online who are into bowling and are, like, ‘This means so much to me,’ ” she said. In truth, she had used the word “striking” when writing the first section. “So I had ‘strike’ in my head and was, like—bowling,” she said. “There really was no deeper meaning.”

Hobert, who is twenty-six, had on a loose all-black outfit, and her strawberry-blond hair was up in a messy bun. After slipping on a pair of rented bowling shoes, she rolled her first ball, then excitedly spun around. Only two pins stood. “I just blew myself away,” she said.

She was enjoying a quiet day on the eve of her first tour, in support of the album, a collection of loquacious bops about twentysomething life (thirst traps, boys without headboards, Uber-driver heart-to-hearts) which led NPR to declare her “pop music’s funniest newcomer.” Two years ago, she was working in a Nickelodeon writers’ room. Only this past October did she do her first full-on, non-acoustic live performance—on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” She didn’t mind looking green: “It’s the truth of where I’m at.”

Hobert put on an olive bucket hat with safety-orange lining and knocked down a few more pins. “When I got into this, nobody in my personal life was surprised,” she said. “But I was, and still am.” She has always been an instinctive entertainer—“When my parents would have friends over, I would, like, get up on the table and dance,” she explained—but her aspirations were elsewhere. Her father, Tim, writes and produces sitcoms (“Spin City,” “Scrubs,” “The Middle”), and she aimed to write, too. Narratives came naturally. “Even in high school, I’d have a crush on a guy, and we’d hang out, but nothing would transpire,” she said. “So I would go home and write out the night going the way I wanted it to.”

“I just think the coolest thing you can be is a writer,” she went on. “I like the idea of not needing to be looked at. I don’t think it’s a very cool quality to want to be the star, but I can’t fight that that’s also a part of my personality.”

Between frames, she admired the alley’s brick wall and stained-glass chandeliers. “The ones in L.A. are very dimly lit and have L.E.D. lights everywhere,” she said, of her home-town bowling scene. “I feel like I can lose myself there.” She had lived in New York for two and a half years, primarily to attend N.Y.U.’s dramatic-writing program, but also out of a love for the HBO series “Girls.” “I walked in on my mom watching it when I was a freshman in high school—some kind of sex scene,” she said. “I was, like, ‘I need to watch this,’ so I watched it behind her back. By senior year, we watched the whole last season together, every week on the couch.”

Hobert applied some hand sanitizer and recounted how, while working at Nickelodeon, she took up songwriting on a whim while living with her childhood best friend, the singer Gracie Abrams. After a heartbroken friend had complained, “It’s just pain these days,” the roommates repeated it as a melody. Soon, they had a full song, and then another. Since then, Abrams has released seven of their collaborations, including the chart-topper “That’s So True.”

“She would basically walk in the door from the Eras Tour”—where Abrams opened for Taylor Swift—“and I’d be there, waiting to write,” Hobert recalled. “Sometimes she was, like, ‘I’m gonna take a nap.’ And I was, like, ‘Don’t take a nap!’ ”

Hobert’s writers’-room experience helped when pursuing her own music. She told record labels that she already had an album title and a cover design (Hobert with her hands in pockets, a clown leering through a window), and a presentation idea: no makeup, wearing her own clothes. “There’s no shtick,” she said. “There’s no ‘This is the kind of thing she is.’ I just don’t want to be described.” She’s since learned that no frills has its snags, too. “There are times I’m, like, God, someone should have told me to fix my hair before I took that picture,” she said.

Hobert rolled another frame, then checked her score—eighty-two. “My deceased uncle’s football number!” she said. Her growing fame has presented a conundrum. “Now that I am being noticed and I feel respected, it’s this weird thing of, like, I want to go back to feeling unnoticed,” she said. “Nothing is quite like locking myself in my apartment, really looking like shit, not seeing anyone, and writing something. It’s where I feel best about myself. It’s kind of all I need.” ♦