Quest to ‘be me’ drives young soul singer Sabriel
She raises her voice in an attempt to speak over the roar of an animatronic bear. The bear’s winning, though, as bears tend to do — especially robotic ones in casinos standing atop artificial rock formations.
The show has begun at Mystic Falls Park in Sam’s Town, the dry ice clouding in front of a waterfall as recorded harmonicas blare, wolves howl and laser-light cowgirls dance across the front of a faux mountain, several stories high.
“This is one my favorite places,” explains Sabriel Hobart as she walks through the hotel’s wooded atrium prior to the onset of the din. “It’s so weird.”
For Hobart, “weird” isn’t a pejorative — she applies the word to herself later in the conversation — it just signifies something that’s different, and better for it, be it a tourist attraction boasting a large motorized eagle or a young soul singer with purple eyelashes and a superb new EP, “shä bré el.”
Hobart, who performs simply as Sabriel, was a teenager when she released her self-titled debut EP in 2012, a collection of understated jazz vamps that positioned her as a “Norah Jones-like singer, someone you’d find at a lounge, nice ballads, stuff like that,” Hobart says. “If I was in this for the money, I would totally go in that direction.”
OK, so what is Hobart in it for, then?
Herself, as “shä bré el” underscores.
Now, we don’t mean this in a selfabsorbed, navel-gazey type of way.
It’s just that “shä bré el” is all about Hobart finding her voice by paying less attention to the voices of others.
“The first EP was really a lot of other people’s ideas,” says Hobart, a former dance student at Las Vegas Academy. “I was super young when I wrote it, so it was like, ‘Well, what