The music industry was shocked this week upon the news that groundbreaking singer-songwriter Jill Sobule died in a house fire outside of Minneapolis on Thursday at age 66. Sobule, beloved among the songwriter community and known for her political activism, broke through in the ‘90s with songs like “I Kissed a Girl,” and “Supermodel.” The former was the first openly gay song to crack the top 20 on the Billboard charts, the latter was featured in the 1995 film Clueless.
Among the many friends of Sobule still in disbelief is Michelle Lewis, a longtime friend and the CEO of the Songwriters of North America. Lewis and Sobule wrote frequently together since the pair met in the mid-2000s. She was preparing to see Sobule soon before she heard the news of Sobule’s passing, as Sobule was supposed to stay at Lewis’s home in Los Angeles next week when she came into town.
Lewis says she “hasn’t been able to move past shock” as she still comes to terms with what’s happened. “She was an otherworldly figure, just magical,” she says.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter a day after Sobule’s death, Lewis describes her friend as a one of a kind writer driven purely by her own creative expression, and a nomadic artist who lived her life freely in whatever way she wanted.
Jill was definitely not like anyone you’ve ever met. I know that in itself is a cliche You’re going hear all those things like about marching to her own drum. But when I say she’s the only one of her kind, I mean literally, the only person like her. I can’t make analogies that are human. She’s like fairy dust, sparkle, brilliance and originality. I can’t think about her in terms of a human, she’s not a normal human. People call Chappell Roan your favorite artist’s favorite artist, Jill was that, a songwriter’s songwriter. Every singer-songwriter’s favorite singer-songwriter.
It didn’t just play out in her music and her songs, but in how she lived her life. She was a vagabond. She didn’t really plant roots. You never knew whether she was in New York or LA or on tour, and that’s kind of the charm of her too. She filled the room with this whirlwind of whimsy.
Kay [Hanley, lead singer of Letters to Cleo] and I had a project/band called The Dilettantes. There was a revolving member. Lisa Loeb was one of them and did a song with us. Tracy Bonham did a song with us. Nina Gorden. Jill met us for the first time to do a Dilettante song. She thought it was really fun to write with two other women. She came into our world, and then she pulled us into her world. I learned the news from Kay, who called me sobbing, I didn’t believe it. My phone just started blowing up. She was the favorite person to many of us. It will be one hell of a memorial.
Every single call or text from Jill had the potential for an adventure. I never said no. Anytime she asked me to do something, I knew there would be an adventure attached to it, so I always said yes, even when I was pregnant with my son.
We had this one adventure together where she asked me to write a song for Ariana Huffington’s book release, which was going to include Ariana Huffington rapping. The book was called Right is Wrong, it was about how the right wing of politics tended to be wrong. We wrote this song around that title with a rap by Ariana in the middle. Ariana came to my home studio to record the rap, and then for the actual book release, we ended up on a private jet to Larry Ellison’s house in San Francisco to perform the song with Ariana in front of Nancy Pelosi. This was 2007 before Obama was elected. That was one of my big adventures with Jill. Larry David and his wife were there, Nora Ephron. It was one of those ‘what is happening’ kind of things, a wild ride.
That was just one of them. Another one was when we opened for Bernie Sanders on his 2016 presidential tour. We went to Iowa and did one of the rallies. We performed as the “Sandrews Sisters.” We wrote a song about net neutrality. She’d say there was an opportunity, I’d say ‘great, come over and we’ll write it.’ Kay would come through and do it too, and then there would be some weird opportunity to perform it in the house of a billionaire.
She was never a namedropper. It was never flexing in any way. She completely transcended any of that bullshit part of celebrity and just floated above it. People like Kara Swisher loved her. She was a key player without being a player. She was like lesbian mafia. She was like a muse of a political movement and really satirized the more ridiculous things about the right wing.
The other thing that’s kind of heartbreaking about this, so many people have been slogging through this political time. We’re just waiting to get to the midterms wondering how we get through this without completely conceding democracy as we know it. And what we were looking forward to with working with Jill was to find an outlet for that fear and dread and exploring the flip side of the ridiculousness and the funny. That was always the exercise with her, finding the funny in the horrible. We were really looking forward to writing. It still hasn’t hit me that we’re not going to be able to do that.
She was untethered in the best way. Some people when they’re untethered will float off, untethered is like a step to unhinged. But she was never unhinged. It was just a freedom that doesn’t exist in people anymore, She was a free spirit. She didn’t have kids, she had some serious relationships in her life. But part of the deal with her is that she was gonna be moving around. She was totally magnetic. And I could see people feeling a little jealous of that freedom that she had. But there was no other way she could be.
As a songwriter, she was inspiring, but also she brought it too. She was an inspiration for ideas, but never bossy or overwhelming. She was really good at playing with others, and ideal in a way, because she didn’t judge your ideas, she didn’t shut you down. She was just buoyant and had a constant flow. When we wrote, we were never trying to write hits or anything like that. We had an assignment, and we would stick to the assignment, which was to write a ridiculous song about something to do with policy or politics. It was never hard. It was always easy.
We were doing a lot of our adventuring when I was pregnant with my son. She knew him as a little kid, she’d see him every once in a while but didn’t know him like she knew me. The last time she was here a few weeks ago, we were writing, and she stayed after. My son came home from school, he’s 17 now. They dug each other, they really hit it off. She left and he went down this total Jill wormhole of her songwriting. The next day he raves about how she’s this heavy songwriter and names all these songs like Underdog Victorious and Mexican wrestler. Because she’s my friend, I completely took it for granted these genius moments.
That reminded me what a motherfucking songwriter she was, it’s easy to forget when you’re just thinking about her as your friend. For all the personality, the humor of her persona, underneath that was this songwriting brilliance that I really hope people discover, rediscover, and will truly appreciate. She was magical.
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