January 1
Jill Sobule
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.
“We were to Judaism what Olive Garden was to Italian restaurants.”
— Sobule describing her tepid religious upbringing to Lilith magazine (Feb. 7, 2023)
Compiled by Bill Dunn
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
Shelley Segal
On this date in 1987, singer/songwriter Shelley Segal was born in Melbourne, Australia, to Jenny and Danny Segal in a traditional Jewish household. For years, her dad was president of the East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation, an Orthodox synagogue. He fronted a klezmer band that was often booked for celebrations of life-cycle events like bar and bat mitzvahs. Jenny, whom Shelley calls “Mum,” managed the band.
Displaying her own talent and surrounded by working musicians, Segal started sitting in with the group when she was 11, playing acoustic guitar and adding her voice to her dad’s. Her religious doubts started during school biology classes when the topic was evolution. “I probably called myself an atheist at 18, but I still thought religion was positive, if not for me. It was the beginning of learning to think critically.” (The Age, April 14, 2012)
“When I got some distance and perspective I saw things I might take issue with — women being separated [in synagogue] and not being allowed to take part in the service or lead the service and, looking back, it’s abhorrent to me that I didn’t see a problem. … When as a teenager I came home and said I didn’t believe in God, it must have felt like a complete rejection. The more I meet people in the movement and hear how hard it’s been for them, the more impressed I am by my family.” (Ibid.)
She released an EP composed of songs she wrote at ages 15–21 in 2009. “An Atheist Album” (2011) included the single “Saved.” It was the first time she’d ever written about her beliefs. “I was told very kindly and very politely by a preacher in the street that I was going to burn in hell forever. So I felt like I wanted to push back and say, ‘I won’t be told how to live my life.’ ” (FFRF’s “Freethought Matters,” Jan. 23, 2025)
“An Atheist Album” explored her beliefs and was hard for her dad to accept, she said, but they had reached common ground and could still play together. “My overall goals are to increase empathy and lessen suffering, humanist goals, those are things my dad can agree with me on.” (Melbourne Herald Sun, Feb. 27, 2013) One of their favorites to perform together is Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love.”
Segal performed at the Reason Rally for religious skeptics in Washington, D.C., in 2012 and 2016, then moved to Los Angeles. By then she had released five recordings. Segal co-produced the 2023 single and video tribute “Mother” with her husband Rob J Robertson. Her dad played violin.
She opened Secret Sauce Studio & Production House in Los Angeles and has been a guest several times on FFRF media and at events, including the 2013 national convention and FFRF’s 2024 winter solstice celebration at Freethought Hall in Madison, Wis.
PHOTO: Courtesy of Shelley Segal.
What will it take for you
— A verse from Segal's song "Saved"
To start opening your eyes
To start questioning the bullshit everyone around you buys
You think it’s any of your business what goes on between my thighs?
I wonder, I wonder,
When we’ll be rid of your lies.
Compiled by Bill Dunn
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
