American singer-songwriter Jill Sobule wasn't particularly well known over this side of the pond, even among music fans... unless you remember her as one of Lloyd Cole's band The Negatives back in 2001...
I guess Jill was a little more well known in the States, where she had a couple of minor hits from her self-titled 1995 album, including one that BBC News claim was "widely considered the first song with openly-gay themes to crack the Billboard Top 20"... although iffypedia says it got to #67, so take your pick who you believe...
That's not the Katy Perry song, by the way... Katy just re-used the title. Jill got there 13 years earlier.
Anyway, I considered myself a fan of Jill's back in the day, though I had rather lost touch with her work in more recent years. I was still shocked to hear of her death last week in a house fire, aged just 66. Lloyd led the tributes: "I'm really too numb to post much of anything. We loved her. She loved us."
The song above was used in the soundtrack of the movie Clueless. That and I Kissed A Girl were the songs most tributes led with. But this was the first Jill Sobule track I thought of when I heard the news...
Very sad news. Can't claim to have been a proper fan but I have enjoyed a fair number of her songs over the years. This is possibly my personal favourite:
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/fFKq9DLzI0Q?si=A2c-6HwAc_UjuSTu