We’ll Have Our Pearls: Jill Sobule, 1959-2025

I don’t use Spotify. I have downloads on my computer that are arranged into playlists, plus of course arranging the files themselves in a system that makes sense to me. One of my playlists is called “KROQ Circa 1995.” It’s the music of high school for me, and as I’ve established, music meant a lot to me in high school. This was my senior year, and in the spring of that year, Jill Sobule released her self-titled album. Which I own, because it was such a fun album that I couldn’t resist picking it up, though I think I probably got it used. I’d been making vague noises about writing this, and then my computer played me some of her music.

Oh, it wasn’t when her career started, but 1995 was a golden era for female indie singer-songwriters. Maybe Jill Sobule wouldn’t have the success of Jagged Little Pill, released a couple of months later, or Nine Stories, from a couple of months after that, but it got regular enough airplay that people my age are familiar with at least a couple of the songs from it. “Supermodel” appeared in Clueless. “I Kissed a Girl” was, according to Sobule’s site, the first openly queer song to crack the Billboard top twenty. Though my favourite song on the album is “Resistance Song.”

It’s funny that both “I Kissed a Girl” and “Supermodel” share names with other, better-known songs. Sobule’s “Supermodel” follows RuPaul’s “Supermodel (You Better Work)” by several years. RuPaul’s is a celebration of the lifestyle; Sobule’s savages it. Sobule’s song features the lines “I didn’t eat yesterday, I’m not gonna eat today, I’m not gonna eat tomorrow.” Conversely, her “I Kissed a Girl,” unlike Katy Perry’s, isn’t about experimentation. It’s about a changing relationship; the characters are best friends who are both in relationships with men but might be something else with each other.

Some of Sobule’s music was light and funny. Some of it was confessional. She used her personal experiences to create her songs. “Soldiers of Christ” is a sharp condemnation of people who use their religion to justify hate. “Island of Lost Things” is a wistful lament about things—and people—gone. Sobule kept going even after the height of fame from the mid-’90s faded, including crowdfunding a couple of albums before crowdfunding was really a thing.

She died in a house fire last week, and Gen-Xers, particularly Gen-X women, were taken aback. My friends took to using “dumb as a box of hammers” because of her. Sobule belongs in a pantheon with Carole King and Joni Mitchell—in fact, she was briefly in the movie Grace of My Heart, about women of that type and career. She will be greatly missed, even if most people only heard that one album. Or even just those two songs. She’s changed some since those days, but we knew it was her by the shape of her mouth.