Thirteen years before Katy Perry had a hit with a different song of the same name, Jill Sobule released “I Kissed a Girl”, a wry, gentle story about two women who leave their boyfriends at home. In 1995 it became one of the first openly LGBTQ-themed songs to reach the Billboard top 20. Sobule died in a house fire in Woodbury, Minnesota, a suburb east of Minneapolis, early on May 1, 2025. She was 66. Her publicist, David Elkin, confirmed her death. Her manager said she was in Minnesota to record a podcast and to help prepare a musical she had written.
Denver to the charts
Sobule was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1959 and began writing songs as a teenager. Her first album, Things Here Are Different, came out in 1990. Five years later her self-titled album brought her national attention with two singles: “I Kissed a Girl”, whose video featured the model Fabio, and “Supermodel”, a satirical song about the fashion industry that appeared on the soundtrack of the film Clueless.
An independent career
Sobule never had another hit on that scale, but she built a loyal following through constant touring and records that mixed humour, politics and personal stories. In 2008 she became one of the first musicians to fund an album directly through her fans, raising the money for California Years by offering rewards from signed CDs to the chance to sing on the record. She also wrote songs for film and television and later created a stage musical drawn from her own adolescence.
Her death
Firefighters were called to the house in Woodbury at about 5:30 a.m. and found her body inside. The cause of the fire was not immediately known. Musicians and fans paid tribute to her songwriting and her wit.
Sobule’s “I Kissed a Girl” was released at a time when such songs were rarely played on mainstream radio, and it reached the top 20 anyway.