Editor’s Note: Jill Sobule tragically died in a house fire May 1, 2025.
Jill Sobule still can’t believe she is on tour with The Fixx. “They’re so nice to me,” the award-winning singer-songwriter says during a recent tour stop in Virginia. “They’ve always been my favorites, but they were especially my favorites in my impressionable years. So it’s hard to not feel a little bit intimidated.”
Nevertheless, the hitmaker of ground-breaking songs such as the first openly gay-themed song to crack the Billboard Top 20, “I Kissed a Girl,” and the 1990s alt-rock anthem “Supermodel” featured in the film Clueless, will step onto the same stage with The Fixx on April 23 at Ludlow Garage in Clifton. “New York is kind of the home base, but there are these not so little places like Cincinnati or Pittsburgh where—I don’t know if it was because they played my songs in the day or what—they’re better than others for me,” says Sobule, who will re-release her 1995 landmark self-titled album in June. “For some reason, I don’t have that big of a fan base in Florida, for example, but Ohio has always been very good to me.”
Sobule certainly hopes that tradition continues, as her political viewpoints, for example, have landed her in some uncomfortable situations as of late. “I had a cold reminder and a slap in the face of how tribal and vitriol of a time this is,” she says. “I’ve been known to do topical and political songs, and a couple nights ago we were in a part of the country that’s pretty red. And so I did a goofy little political song, and I looked out at the audience and it honestly looked like they hated me.”
So, Sobule did what she’s done 1,000 times before. “I try to disarm them,” she says. “It’s just as easy to be nice as it is to be an asshole.”
Ultimately, at this moment in her career, Sobule, 60, says she doesn’t want to rock the boat too much. “It’s a fine line between wanting to do my songs that harken back to the 1960s songs of protest and balancing that with the fact that I don’t want to bum out the crowd. But The Fixx have been so supportive of whatever I want to do, so for the most part the tour has been fantastic.”
In fact, Sobule says she thrives on this sort of constant creative navigation. “I’m certainly not used to tiptoeing around,” she says, noting that she’s also releasing the cast recording of her 2022 autobiographical musical F*ck 7th Grade in June. “So it’s interesting and even wonderful to figure out what you can get away with and how you can still relate to people who disagree with you.”
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