On this date in 1959, singer-songwriter Jill Susan Sobule was born in Denver to Elaine (née Kramish) and Marvin Sobule. Her mother was a musician and her father was a veterinarian. She would later call herself a “Denver Jew, third generation from the Old Country” although it was a secular, cultural Judaism.
Sobule (pronounced SOH-bewl) made her stage debut in first grade as “Miss Hanukkah and Queen Esther.” She played guitar in jazz band as the “token Jew” at St. Mary’s Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school where she was excused from theology class but chose to attend anyway, even playing guitar during Mass. “I’ve always been, and still am, interested in everything from world religions to weirdo cults.” Drawn to feminism, she frequented the Women to Women bookstore. “I remember going in there like going into a speakeasy for books. I remember having this huge crush on Gloria Steinem. I was a little political girl, a little radical left-winger.” (Lilith magazine, Feb. 7, 2023)
She enrolled at the University of Colorado at Boulder to major in political science and spent a semester in Spain before ending her college education to concentrate on her music. She had well-established herself as a free spirit at UC-Boulder, once dressing as a pregnant Girl Scout on Halloween.
The first song she ever wrote was titled “Nixon Is a Bad Man, Spiro Agnew Is Too.” “I was this badass little girl. I was the best guitar player, but there were no role models for us. And as a little strange girl with queer feelings in the ’70s, the only role models I had for that was Miss Hathaway from ‘The Beverly Hillbillies.’ Or my gym teacher, who looked like Pete Rose.” (New York Times, Oct. 12, 2022)
Sobule’s debut album “Things Here Are Different” (1990) was produced by pop legend Todd Rundgren but languished on store shelves. Her eponymous 1995 album with the singles “I Kissed a Girl” and “Supermodel” made inroads on Billboard charts and gained her a considerable following. “People call me a one-hit wonder, and I say, ‘Wait a second, I’m a two-hit wonder!’ When I had ‘Kissed a Girl’ coming out, it was dicey because it was like, ‘Is she a lesbian singer-songwriter?’ ” (Ibid.)
The former song detailed an innocent, budding lesbian flirtation between two suburban girlfriends, and Katy Perry’s use in 2008 of the same title for a different song deeply angered Sobule. “Supermodel” (“I didn’t eat yesterday … and I’m not gonna eat today … and I’m not gonna eat tomorrow … ’cause I’m gonna be a supermodel”) was included on the soundtrack of the teen comedy “Clueless” starring Alicia Silverstone.
Sobule’s song topics “were often autobiographical, including depression, eating disorders and queerness – not the typical fare of pop songs, especially when Sobule was starting out in the early-to-mid 1990s. Sobule also often wrote about her Jewish background and concerns. In this manner, she was a serious Jewish artist as much as she was a queer icon who described herself as bisexual,” wrote Seth Rogovoy. (The Forward, May 2, 2025)
A collaboration between Sobule and atheist entertainer Julia Sweeney started in 2006 after they discovered they were on similar philosophical wavelengths. Sweeney’s one-woman stage show “Letting Go of God” had debuted in 2004, and Sobule wrote and sang the title song for the recorded version of “Letting Go.”
They started performing “The Jill and Julia Show” in 2007, a combination of music and story-telling, at the James Randi Educational Foundation meeting in Las Vegas and at regular showings for the Groundlings Theater in Los Angeles. They did several TED talks and took the show on the road, including to FFRF’s 2013 national convention in Madison, Wis.
Sobule sang an original song as herself on the 2019 episode of “The Simpsons” titled “Marge the Lumberjill” in which Marge becomes a lumberjill competitor with Patty’s lesbian friend, which worries Homer.
Her show “F*ck7thGrade” debuted off-Broadway in 2022 and featured her three-piece band Secrets of the Vatican. It recounted her awkward days in middle school and the furtive same-sex crushes she had. While staying at a friend’s house in 2025 in Woodbury, Minn., she died in a fire at age 66. (D. 2025)
PHOTO: Sobule in 2009 under CC 2.0.
