Somebody Someone, the moniker of Austin, Texas-based alt-pop singer and songwriter Aubrey Hays remembers their first performance. It was a wintry day during a family sleigh ride when they decided to break into the Judy Garland Wizard of Oz classic “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” winning over their immediate audience.
By the time they were 10, they were performing with their family band at weddings and other gatherings in their hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi. The band even won a radio contest to open for Blake Shelton during the 2007 Crawfish Music Festival before they later studied theater performance at Vassar College and sang in an all-female a cappella group.
After moving to Austin in 2015, they tapped into the Johnny Mercer Foundation Songwriters Project and songwriting sessions at the Sonic Ranch residential recording studios in Tortilla, Texas, which helped expand their scope as a writer. “What do I want to put out into the world?” they said in a previous statement. “I want to offer people a space to express and learn things about themselves.”
In 2020, Hays had already warmed up with some reflective stories, exposing more of themself from their debut “Isn’t It Enough” through “Statue” and the more ignited “I Want to See Through This” a year later, and all prefaced a more immeasurable awakening to come.
The artist’s latest, “Better,” is an epistle of finding themselves, a deeper excavation prompted by health challenges and their own gender identity. The delicate piano ballad exposes the calm of finally knowing oneself, truly. Make me a ghost / Just someone you knew / If you’re looking for her / She’s not looking for you / That girl is gone now / There’s somebody new, they sing through the revelatory lyrics.
“This song came to me at a time when I didn’t believe the words I was writing,” they tell American Songwriter. “I was doing some deep inner work and learning to have the same compassion I had for others for myself. So as I was writing this and watching my pen move around on the page I was sitting there thinking, ‘Where is this coming from?’”
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They continue, “I’m not religious but I am spiritual. I believe in higher powers, ancestral nudges, and universal truths delivered to people willing to accept them. The music I’ve written since penning this song has all been influenced by something greater than myself and I feel like it has something to do with working with and not against my inner nature.”
To capture its essence, sonically, they snuck into a studio to track the vocals and piano while attending an artist program at the Sonic Ranch. “I’d previously recorded it elsewhere but something didn’t feel quite right about it,” they said. “I feel like I hadn’t marinated in its message enough to believe it. And then, like magic, I did. Something about the environment at Sonic Ranch is visceral in all the right ways—it must be on a leyline.”
A year after recording, Hays and Jacob Sciba put some final touches on the track at Arlyn Studios in Austin. For the video, which Somebody Someone co-directed with fellow Mississippian Wil Kelly, they’re sat at the piano with rainbow-splashed eyelids and ocean-blue teardrops dripping down their cheeks. Dreamlike in its backdrop and with an element of dance, the video brings each word centerstage—Make me a memory / Put me away / I’ll let you down easy / And then I will fade / Into the ether, to the unknown.
“I knew I wanted to make something that brought the spirit of Austin and this song alive,” they said. “It was amazing to be able to loop in all these people I call friends.” Makeup artist Lindy Robinson brought Hays’ dramatic features to life. “She brought to life this extra special piece with the makeup and progression of the tears, they added, while ballet dancer Vivien Farrell, who recently played Ophelia in Hamlet is featured dancing in the video.
“I was just in awe of her performance,” recalled Hays, “showing her my rib tattoo directly after that has all the flowers Ophelia mentions in her final monologue.”
The video was made after Hays was awarded a grant from the Live Music Fund in the city and shot at the Scottish Rite Theater in Austin. “I’m really just a theater kid at heart and when I discovered that they had a fully equipped woodland backdrop I was sold,” they said. “The woods have and always will be my safe place. So much of this just felt right. And I feel like we created something beautiful together.”
Photos: Delaney Gibson Moon
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