By Eleni P. Austin
Jill Sobule began her recording career 35 years ago and stormed the charts five years later with her Folk-Pop gem, “I Kissed A Girl.” Last week, she died tragically in a house fire. The Denver native, age 66, was in the midst of a tour that was returning her to her hometown on May 2nd.
This one really hurts. Jill was a singular talent, and I fell in love with her sound in the early ‘90s. Her 1990 debut was produced by Todd Rundgren, but it slipped through the cracks, commercially speaking. Luckily, a few discerning fans caught on, along with musical peers like Joe Jackson and Lloyd Cole. After her first label dropped her, she made an album with Joe that has yet to see the light of day.
By 1995, she signed with Atlantic Records and released her eponymous sophomore effort. The break-out hit, “I Kissed A Girl” reached #20 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart, and #67 on The Hot 100. A sly song that humorously explored same-sex attraction with wit and affection, it was equal parts subversive and sincere. (13 years later, Katy Perry co-opted the title for a glib and calculated song that substituted prurience for integrity. It was a hit too, despite her craven intentions and caterwauling vocal style).
Jill’s third long-player, Happy Town, arrived two years later, while it was embraced by music critics and her growing legion of fans, it was considered a commercial disappointment, and her record label dropped her. She quickly signed with Beyond Records for her 2000 album, Pink Pearl and then jumped to Artemis Records for 2004’s Underdog Victorious. Four years later, she successfully crowd-sourced enough dough to record her sixth record, The California Years. All told, she recorded 10 studio albums, a live effort, and a Hits compilation.
She also collaborated with everyone from Robin Eaton, Richard Barone and Ben Lee to Julia Sweeney, Margaret Cho and John Doe. She shared stages with Neil Young, Syd Straw, Steve Earle, Billy Bragg, Cyndi Lauper, Tom Morello and Warren Zevon. She also played herself and performed a song on The Simpsons, wrote the theme song and contributed music to the Nickelodeon series Unfabulous. In 2022, her semi-autobiographical musical Fuck The 7th Grade, had its theatrical debut in New York City and was nominated for a Drama Desk award.
I feel like I need to tell you all of this because you probably don’t know it. I also feel like I should have followed her more closely these last few years, because I definitely would have written about her most recent albums and projects here in the pages of the Coachella Valley Weekly. Mostly, while I have your attention, I want to tell you about her music.
For many of her earliest fans, “I Kissed A Girl,” off her self-titled sophomore effort, was their gateway drug. Not only was it a bouncy, Folk-Pop gem, but perspicacious lyrics offered up a earnest scenario that made same-sex attraction seem natural and wholesome. More importantly, it allowed marginalized teens to come to terms with their own burgeoning feelings.
But that song was just the tip of the iceberg. From the hipster cool of “When My Ship Came In,” which managed to wed ‘60s Psychedelia to a snake-hipped Jazz groove, or the Parisian lilt of “Resistance Song,” which spins out a dreamscape rich in quirky detail: “I had this dream we were fighting in the resistance, somewhere in France, fighting traitors and fascists, you were my mistress, yeah, you were a woman, but I knew it was you, by the shape of your mouth, you called me Maurice, and I had a thin moustache, I played clarinet in a decadent band…In real life, I’m a cocktail waitress, dodging men’s hands instead of bullets, and you are a bass player in a band that got a deal, dealing with assholes instead of explosives.”
A fierce feminist and openly bisexual, Jill’s songs were populated with women who defied expectations. Take “Claire,” a shimmery Pure Pop confection about a WW II aviatrix who is now exhibiting the signs of dementia: “Dear Claire, she was a pioneer, her sister said she flew in World War II, she stares out the kitchen door, she says it looks like rain, I’m sure it’s gonna rain…She told me back in ’44, she slept with Eleanor, sometimes she gets confused, for all we know it’s true.”
Then there’s the sunny Cha-Cha-Cha of “Karen.” She’s buttoned-up shoe store manager by day and an adventuress when the sun goes down: “Karen by night, imagine she must lead a very dull life, with a cat or a book by her side, we know her by day but we don’t know her by night, the leather comes out under the moonlight, takes off her Chanel and hops on her bike, looking like Marlon Brando, looking like young Marlon Brando, wish I could be more like Karen by night….looking like young Marlon Brando, not like old fat Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.”
Meanwhile, there’s the finger-poppin’ cool of “Margaret.” Lyrics share the saga of a high school “It Girl,” who was the envy of her peers (“she developed first”). She misses the reunion and everyone wonders what happened to St Mary’s glamorous girl. Turns out, she moved to West Hollywood and found fame in the Adult Film industry.
Throughout her career, Jill’s music could be clever, wistful, laugh-out-loud funny, and poignant. She also managed to cover other people’s songs and somehow make them her own. She offered up the most delicate rendition of Warren Zevon’s “Don’t Let Us Get Sick.” She also radically recalibrated the Fifth Dimension hit, “Stoned Soul Picnic,” (which was written by Laura Nyro). Using their pristine, Sunshine Pop arrangement as a blueprint, she cloaked the song in a hallucinogenic haze that included a modal sitar and anchored by a percolating groove.
Yeah, I could go on and on, but I’ll stop with “Heroes,” a rollicking rave-up that waggishly reminds us that even our coolest, cleverest idols can be assholes: “William Faulkner, drunk and depressed, Dorothy Parker, mean, drunk and depressed, and that guy in Seven Years In Tibet turned out to be a Nazi/The founding fathers all had slaves, the explorers slaughtered the braves, the Old Testament God can be so petty.”
So, stop reading now. Go play Jill Sobule music on whatever platform is available to you and listen to one of the most sui generis songwriters of the last three decades. In a perfect world she would have been a superstar. In the fractured, fucked-up world we’ve got, at least we still have her music.
