Jill Sobule, singer-songwriter known for '90s pop hit 'I Kissed a Girl,' dies in house fire at 66

Jill Sobule, the vocalist and songwriter whose 1995 deed “I Kissed a Girl” was the uncommon popular opus of that epoch to instrumentality an openly queer taxable into the taste mainstream, died Thursday. She was 66.

Her decease was announced by her spokesman, David Elkin, who said she died successful a location occurrence successful the Minneapolis suburb of Woodbury. Sobule had been connected circuit and was scheduled to play a hometown performance Friday nighttime successful Denver.

With a crisp wit and a playwright’s melodramatic sense, Sobule wrote astir characters squaring their interior lives with the mode the satellite views them, and she had a flair for vividly drawn scenes successful which radical marque discoveries astir themselves.

“I Kissed a Girl,” which puts a bouncy folk-pop groove beneath Sobule’s lightly raspy vocal, opens with 2 friends hanging retired 1 nighttime arsenic they comparison notes connected their disappointing boyfriends. Soon they’re drinking and smoking and the narrator’s person takes disconnected her overcoat. Sobule, who identified arsenic bisexual, sings:

She called location to accidental she’d beryllium late

He said he’d disquieted but present he’d consciousness safe

I’m gladsome you’re with your girlfriend

Tell her hullo for me

And past I looked astatine you

You had guilt successful your eyes

But it lone lasted a small while

And past I felt your manus supra my knee

“I Kissed a Girl,” which came retired arsenic the pb azygous from Sobule’s self-titled 1995 LP, reached the apical 20 of Billboard’s alternate vigor illustration and peaked astatine No. 67 connected the all-genre Hot 100; the song’s euphony video, starring the exemplary Fabio arsenic 1 of the crummy boyfriends, was nominated for 2 prizes astatine MTV’s Video Music Awards. Sobule’s self-titled medium besides spawned the punky “Supermodel,” which was featured connected the soundtrack of that year’s deed “Clueless” movie.

Sobule was portion of a mid-’90s cohort of clever songwriters that included Juliana Hatfield, Lisa Loeb and Liz Phair, whose occurrence could beryllium seen arsenic a absorption to the gloomy, male-dominated grunge craze of a fewer years earlier. Yet Sobule recognized the persistent sexism that followed her and her peers onto tv and the covers of magazines.

“I emotion the mode they effort to pit america against each different — similar it’s ‘Dynasty’ and we’re gonna get successful a Joan Collins/Linda Evans fight,” she joked to The Times successful 1995. “Me and Sheryl Crow, going astatine it!”

Sobule was calved successful Denver successful 1959 and played guitar successful her precocious schoolhouse jazz band. Studying overseas portion successful college, she was spotted by a nightclub proprietor arsenic she and a person performed connected the thoroughfare successful Madrid; helium invited them to play his club, and she dropped retired of schoolhouse a period later.

In 1990, Sobule made a debut medium with Todd Rundgren for MCA Records that went obscurity contempt plentifulness of captious praise. (Writing successful The Times, Chris Willman called it “as accomplished a debut arsenic you’ll perceive this year.”) MCA dropped her earlier releasing a 2nd LP she’d made with Joe Jackson.

“It was a truly hard clip successful my life,” Sobule told The Times successful 1995. “I mean, I had nary different skills, speech from having studied governmental science.”

Atlantic signed her for “Jill Sobule” past released its 1997 follow-up, “Happy Town,” which failed to output different popular hit.

Yet Sobule continued to grounds and perform, and she established a vocation successful tv that included the taxable opus for Nickelodeon’s “Unfabulous.” In 2009 she published a portion connected the Huffington Post successful which she explained tongue-in-cheek remarks she’d made successful an earlier interrogation astir Katy Perry, who’d topped the Hot 100 the erstwhile twelvemonth with a antithetic opus called “I Kissed a Girl.”

“I whitethorn beryllium a interaction cynical astir the business, but I person ne'er truly been aggravated oregon had sick feelings towards Katy herself,” she wrote. “I was really successful a tiny mode blessed to not beryllium the ‘Kissed a Girl’ miss anymore.”

For her 2014 album, “Dottie’s Charms,” Sobule wrote songs to lyrics she commissioned from writers specified arsenic Jonathan Lethem, David Hajdu and Vendela Vida.

“I’m an older pistillate who’s not going to person a shiny popular opus ever again, truthful that gives maine licence to bash immoderate the hellhole I want,” she told the New York Times with a laugh.

Sobule’s astir caller task was an autobiographical coming-of-age philharmonic called “F*ck7thGrade” whose archetypal formed signaling is owed for merchandise successful June. Her survivors see a member and respective nephews.