It was a good life

A tribute to beloved singer-songwriter Jill Sobule

May 04, 2025

On Thursday evening, we heard that our friend, singer-songwriter Jill Sobule, had died in a house fire in Woodbury, MN. I still can’t believe that she’s gone.

I’ve been a huge fan of Jill’s music since the beginning- she was one of the smartest, funniest, singer-songwriters around, writing songs that tackled important issues with wit and humor.

And as Seth Rogovy wrote in her obituary in The Forward,

While most obituaries and appreciations have noted that Sobule’s song topics were often autobiographical, including depression, eating disorders and queerness – not the typical fare of pop songs, especially when Sobule was starting out in the early-to-mid 1990s – Sobule also often wrote about her Jewish background and concerns… she was a serious Jewish artist as much as she was a queer icon who described herself as bisexual.

Back in the early days of the first Trump campaign, I wrote about all the dog whistles he was employing, and how I grew up evaluating non-Jewish people on if I thought they would hide me in their attic if there was another Holocaust. A particularly vile blogger in Greenwich demonstrated his ignorance and antisemitism by declaring this was “proof” of my “hysteria” about the candidate.

I felt like directing him to Jill’s song Attic, which asked the same question:

Would you have hidden me in your attic
That's the question I'd like to know
Would you have climbed up to serve my dinner
Well I hope so

But there were deeper ties. Jill’s late aunt, Mickey, was one of my mother’s closest friends. They met when my older brother and Jill’s cousin Steve were at the same school in London in the early 1970’s. Twenty years later, Jill came and stayed with at our house in rural Dorset when she was in England to promote one of her albums - my memory is foggy but it was either Things Here are Different in 1990 or the eponymous Jill Sobule in 1995.

By the time I Never Learned to Swim came out, I’d moved back to CT. I had the CD in the car, playing it on auto repeat and singing along. Last night my daughter and I were reminiscing about Jill, and I reminded A of a time we were listening to '“Resistance Song”:

“We promised if one of us left or died
We'd meet again in another life and we'll

Hide in the bushes
We'll shoot from the bushes
Make love in the bushes
Like there's no tomorrow
We'll hide in the bushes
We'll shoot from the bushes
Make love in the bushes
Like there is no tomorrow”

From the back seat A, then of nursery school age, piped up: “Do they have lunch in the bushes too?”

In 2002, I took A to an outdoor Jill concert at Storrs - she remembers it as her first ever concert. A was also, for a short time, the model for a Jill Sobule beret on the website, with the caption “adorable budding supermodel not included.” Wish I could find that picture - if I do I’ll add it to this post.

A also remembered vividly the last line of Under the Disco Ball, one of Jill’s many critiques of the Christian Right, and their fear of ‘The Gay Agenda’

They have a scheme
They have a plan
To take the children of our land
Turn them into stylists
And women who play golf

As Toni Morrison said, “All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’ We’ve just dirtied the word ‘politics,’ made it sound like it’s unpatriotic or something.”

Jill and my daughter A at UConn Storrs, 8 27 02. I can’t remember exactly why we were thanking Josh and Steve from Happytown, Jill’s listserv, but I think it’s because they sent me live concert tape?

But perhaps the most important reason I’m forever indebted to Jill is because she and Ann Coulter (I hate mentioning Coulter in the same sentence as Jill, but you’ll understand why below) are responsible for my almost 19-year relationship (a decade of ‘test driving’ and eight and a half years of marriage and counting) with my husband, H.

It’s a wild story, but now seems like the time to share it.

Back in the 2000’s, Jill had a fan listserv called Happytown after the album of the same name (remember listservs, fellow Internet olds?). It was run by our beloved, avuncular “Mayor” Tony Camas, and was a fun and lively place.

L-R: Happytown Mayor Tony Camas, Jill Sobule, and me at UCONN Storrs, 8 27 02

In January 2006, when I found out that my first novel, Confessions of a Closet Catholic had won the Sydney Taylor Award for Older Readers, I made an off topic post about it, to celebrate with my Happytown friends. I was in the third year of a really awful divorce, and winning the award felt like a sign that maybe, just maybe, everything would turn out okay in the end.

Unbenowst to me, H was also on the listserv and a huge Jill Sobule fan. He read the post and thought “Littman, huh, sounds like a nice Jewish girl…”

He googled me, found my websites and blogs, and thought I was cute and funny from what he read and saw. But he lived in Boston and I lived in CT and he couldn’t tell if I was married or divorced. He thought about me for a few days, and considered emailing me, but he was afraid it might be creepy, and he didn’t want to end up on the Wall of Shame I had on my columnist website, where I posted some of the crazy emails that landed in my inbox. The kinds of emails I wouldn’t respond to directly because I’d learned not to feed the trolls, but were so ridiculous and ignorant I’d fact check them on the Wall of Shame.

So that was the end of that, and it was probably a good thing, because the timing wouldn’t have been right. I’d just sworn off dating until the divorce was over, because it was too much to deal with. I had to focus on being a mom.

Fast forward to September 2006. A trial date had finally been set for my divorce, and I decided to log back into JDate to “window shop”. I had no intention of actually dating anyone , but I wanted to see what kind of guys were out there for when the time was right.

H would never have come up in my searches, because he was a) a little younger than me, b) had never been married and c) didn’t have kids. I figured any guy younger than me without kids would most likely want them, and I was not in that place. Also, he lived in Boston, and with two kids, a long distance relationship would add too much complexity.

But since I was merely window shopping with no intention of dating, I looked at the “Currently online” list, something I didn’t normally do.

There I came across H’s profile. In his header, he wrote about how crazy it is that some woman wrote to him saying “You live in Boston, you must be a liberal, and like Ann Coulter, I hate all liberals.”

See, even back in 2006, things were polarized.

I’d had a particular dislike of Ann Coulter, after she disparaged 9/11 widows, stating that she’d “never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much." It only increased after her Christian Nationalist statement about Jews: "We just want Jews to be perfected, as they say…That is what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament, but ours is more like Federal Express."

F*ck that self-aggrandizing, antisemitic twerp.

My deep disgust for Ann Coulter compelled to DM him:

OMG I hope you didn’t date her. Ann Coulter is the bride of the AntiChrist.

That’s all I wrote. Didn’t sign it and I never expected to hear back from him.

But the next day, I got a DM from H that read: “Dear Sarah - I bet you’re wondering how I know your name…”

Woah, yes I am, stalker!

He went on to explain about googling me after my January post on Happytown, and how when he got the short, unsigned DM on JDate the previous evening he was wondering where he’d seen the woman in the picture before. It took him a few minutes, but then he realized that it was the same person he’d thought about contacting.

Beschert or what?

It turned out that he was going to be in New York in October, and he suggested we meet at Joe’s Pub, where Jill was doing a show. And so, our first date was on 10/23/2006 at Jill’s concert. The rest, as they say, is history.

With Jill, back at Joe’s Pub where it all began, 7.7.23

We celebrated our 10 year anniversary in 2016 by getting married, and I am forever grateful that our mutual love of Jill brought us together.

Friday morning, we were sitting on the sofa and H played “A Good Life” from Jill’s crowd-funded 2009 album, California Years. I found myself in tears, and when I looked over at H, he was too.