April 6th, 2025 – Jill Sobule performed a delightful acoustic show at the Keswick Theater on April 5, where she is currently on tour with British Rock group, The Fixx.
Sobule is a defining figure in the canon of influential 1990s female singer-songwriters. Her 1995 breakout hit, “I Kissed A Girl,’ made waves as one of the first songs ever to address aspects of a lesbian relationship, and it was one of the first queer songs to reach the top of the Billboards.
Verbiage + Article by Erin Hunter (@erinehunter)
“I’d like to think I was a pioneer,” she tells me in a conversation off-stage. Her presence at Lilith Fair–a groundbreaking all-female music festival that reshaped the late 1990s landscape–only underscores this.
Sobule also found mainstream success with “Supermodel, ” featured in the cult classic film Clueless (1995). The track’s upbeat melody has a biting sarcasm that pokes fun at the naive and disillusioned dreams associated with having extreme fame and beauty. Sobule explores this playful tension–the conflicting ideas, sounds, and emotions–on many other tracks, whether it’s singing about apocalypse or dreaming about jetpacks:
I’d take you up so high
If I dropped you, you would die
But I want you by my side, in my jetpack
Lyrically it’s a bit morbid. But there is a perceived innocence behind the message, suggesting that she can reach deeper layers while keeping it playful. When you factor in her short blonde pixie haircut and wide eyes, she could be a real-life fairy.
And just like the fairy, she has some trickery up her sleeve. Toward the end of her set, she convinces audience members to harmonize in a song about a public figure who she implies to be a [insert four letter bad word].
She never curses during the set–the word is only ever implied–but some audience members do sing it loudly and it gives her impish glee. “I never said anything bad, YOU did!”
Some people would argue that “I Kissed A Girl” was her only hit. She admits that that label has followed her. but she would beg to disagree. “F*** you. I’m a two-hit wonder,” she jokes. Despite what the people say, she has had a long and successful career, whether it’s making music, writing plays, or touring around the world.
She tells me that she was an “outlier” back in the 1990s. She still is, in the best of ways.
