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May 2001 Issue

She's Jewish...and She Kissed a Girl

By Carolyn Slutsky

What is the writer of the biggest lesbian pop song of the 90s doing performing in a Jewish cultural center? Well, it doesn't take much digging through the discography of singer-songwriter Jill Sobule, best known for her 1995 hit "I Kissed a Girl," to reveal a healthy interest in Jewish themes. Judaism was a definite focus at her recent concert at Makor, New York's newest center for Jewish culture, from her opening declaration: "I'm home!", to her encore, a jaunty sing-along rendition of Fiddler on the Roof's "Sunrise, Sunset." (She seemed to be one of the few people in the room who knew all the words.)

Cute, blond, and petite, Sobule is a fierce pixie. Her lyrics reveal a social conscience and a gift for observation that cuts like a knife. While Judaism hasn't been a primary focus of Sobule's career, she notes that "every album of mine has to have at least one World War II reference. I don't do it consciously, it's just something that's in my subconscious. I think that if I wasn't Jewish I probably wouldn't be writing those songs."

Those songs include "Attic," in which Sobule imagines hiding out like Anne Frank and asks, "would you have hidden me in your attic?" and "Heroes," which poses the question, "why are all our heroes so imperfect?" noting that "T.S. Eliot hated the Jews, FDR didn't save the Jews."

Born in Colorado, Sobule had what she calls "a pretty liberal" Reform Jewish upbringing with "a strong sense of Jewish identity." When prompted to realize that both Makor and the Knitting Factory, her self-proclaimed favorite venue, are Jewish-oriented, and that her favorite singers from the 60s--Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Carol King, and the like are all Jews--Sobule acknowledges, "I never really thought of it that way, but for some reason it feels good for me."

Sobule got her first break on a street corner in Seville, Spain while on a study abroad program. "Just as a joke I was busking on the street with a friend, and I decided to sing my own songs because I thought, 'what do I have to lose? I'll never see these people again, and I'm a continent away, and they don't understand what I'm saying anyway.' And a guy walked by and said he owned a nightclub and would we want to play his club? And at first I thought, 'yeah, what kind of club?' You know, [we were] young American girls, and it ended up being totally legit. And about two months later I dropped out of school and ended up staying in Spain for three more months. So that was my dubious start."

Her many fans can be thankful for Sobule's Seville serendipity. They appreciate her friendly, funny performances and the accessibility of her lyrics; her songs condense the real-life situations of her world into three-minute stories. Whether she's singing about how years of wearing orthopedic shoes as a kid "[messed] her up" (from her song "Big Shoes"), or about unrequited love with the beautiful line: "I can crack all your ribs but I can't break your heart" ("Mexican Wrestler"), or about the too-thin girl we've all seen who stays just a bit too long at the gym ("Lucy at the Gym"), Sobule's songs feel like the stories you wish you could tell about your own life.

"I'm such a voyeur, maybe if I wasn't [writing and performing] I'd be a shrink," Sobule explains. "I love watching people and trying to analyze them, and I think a lot of my stories are [about] people that interest me enough to write about them. But also maybe there's a little bit of myself in them."

By far her best-known song, "I Kissed a Girl," is the story of a triumphant girl who finds happiness in accepting herself and proclaims, "I kissed a girl, her lips were sweet. She was just like kissing me. I kissed a girl, won't change the world, but I'm so glad I kissed a girl." (MTV was filming her at Makor for their show on singers who had big hits in the 90s, and Sobule made sure the enthusiastic audience sang these not-forgotten lyrics loudly.)

But she has mixed feelings about being identified so strongly with a single song. "It's a blessing and a curse, it was kind of cool that it was the first song really of its kind that broke the top 40, and I get lots of people coming up and e-mailing me, and saying, 'when I was a kid that song really helped me come out,' and so that's kind of cool," says Sobule. "But on the other hand people sort of thought of it as 'am I a novelty artist?' and didn't hear anything else of mine. So sometimes it gets annoying, you know 'you're the "kissed a girl" girl.' But I would say for the most part I'm not going to get negative about it because it was my one hit and I may never have another one."

So does Sobule advise the guitar-happy college musician to drop out of school to become a singer-songwriter? "No," she laughs, "what pain my life has been! If that guy hadn't walked by I wonder what my life would have been like. For better or worse, I don't know. It's been wonderful, but it's been a really hard, hard road. There are times I wish I had something to fall back on, and I don't."

As for now, she won't have to go back to school just yet. Her label, Beyond Music, released a compilation CD in March, and she is working on a new batch of songs. Judging from her enthusiastic reception at Makor, Sobule isn't exiting the stage anytime soon.

This article was first published in New Voices Magazine, a publication of the Jewish Student Press Service.

Carolyn Slutsky graduated from Barnard College in 2000.

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