In some ways, among musicians whose catalogs are not chock-full of universally recognizable hits, Jill Sobule‘s catalog is exceptionally well-suited for a tribute show.
In some ways, among musicians whose catalogs are not chock-full of universally recognizable hits, Jill Sobule‘s catalog is exceptionally well-suited for a tribute show. The late singer-songwriter’s songs are clever, but not clever in the kind of way you get an hour or a year later; each number is vivid, high-concept, direct, usually (but not always) funny and instantly relatable. It doesn’t matter whether you’re coming to a memorial concert for her as a Jill mega-fan or a plus-one — the songs hit you equally hard on the first listen or the 50th, she created such compelling scenarios in each three-minute sampling. She provided, to borrow a term, the supermodel of how to hook a listener in the first 30-45 seconds, and to let you feel like you’d had a full melodic and narrative meal by the end.
Not that she didn’t occasionally indulge in a bit of misdirection with a song title. “Mexican Wrestler,” one of her most emotionally relatable ballads, was not about Mexican wrestlers, as it turned out, but the kind of unrequited love that feels like it somehow merits a full body-slam. But she did have a knack for directness, in her naming of songs, too, more often than not. Take “I Kissed a Girl,” her biggest hit (and a title so irresistible it got some, uh, additional pickup). And the final song she was ever semi-famous for, “JD Vance Is a Cunt”… maybe not the song whose notoriety she would have chosen to go out on, but somewhere up there, she has to be smiling that this, of all possible tunes, ended up as kind of a news-media epitaph upon her passing May 1.
There’s so much to her 35-year catalog of recorded shows that any single tribute show is going to feel too short. Fortunately, in the bigger scheme of things, a lot of that material is going to be covered over the coming months in a series of “Jillith Fair” tribute concerts happening nationwide to benefit the Jill Sobule Foundation, and to bring her communities of fans together regionally. (Scroll down to see a full list of the upcoming shows.) The first three of these took place over the weekend, including an L.A.-area show at McCabe’s that was already in the works when the larger series of celebrations began to take shape. If you loved her, you’ll probably wish you could be a Jill-head and travel to a lot of them, knowing that after this wave passes, the opportunity to hear undersung classics like “Underdog Victorious” performed in concert will be few. For now, we can appreciate the sudden Sobule glut.
At the show at McCabe’s, the mood was light, but not so light as to ignore the existential unfairness that saw Sobule perish in a fire exactly one month earlier. “Jill’s passing was an absolute shock because she had survived so much already,” said Perla Batalla. “You know, I mean, she had brain surgery and she survived. She was in the fucking music business and she survived. So I thought Jill would live forever, and she will in many ways.”
There was Fabio, who starred in her “I Kissed a Girl” video, making a surprise appearance, watching most of the show from the McCabe’s stairs and stepping up when called upon by Lisa Loeb to offer a sweet testimonial. “It’s unbelievable, what happened, and it breaks my heart,” Fabio said. “She was such a good person and such an amazing soul. It’s amazing, sometimes, the good ones who leave early… God bless your soul, Jill. We had a really great time working on that video, and I will treasure my memory for the rest of my life.”
Comic-turned-singer Margaret Cho, who sang the aforementioned “Mexican Wrestler,” was a bit more tart in her feelings about the loss.
“She would be so excited” about the tribute, Cho told the audience. “She’d be, ‘Oh man, did you see fucking Fabio?’,” giving herself credit for her “great impression” of Sobule’s speaking voice (it was). “She was always so enchanted by life. Everything that happened, she was like, ‘Oh my God, did you see that?’ — like, the most optimistic, gentle, kind, but excited-about-life person. And like, why is she dead? I’m so mad. I just had a lot of anger, because, like, why am I alive? I’m the most negative, shitty, mean, ungrateful, pissed-off, don’t care (person). And also bad habits in life — I’m one foot in the grave, the other on a semen-filled condom. … It’s just not fair when she was so bright and shining. I blame Katy Perry,” Cho joked (presumably). “I feel like this is Katy Perry’s fault.”
The evening began a brief introduction from McCabe’s concert booker, Wayne Griffith, who described Sobule’s multiple nights playing the intimate venue, remarking on how at “the end of the night, she’d hang out in the office out there, and we would talk, and she was always just as sweet as can be — just one of the nicest people I’ve ever met here, and I wanted to do something for her.” That something entailed enlisting Dan Navarro to act as host and assemble the bill, mostly filled with mutual friends, although he noted he’d never met Cho or Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello prior to their gracious signing-on. (Cho will also perform at a separate L.A. tribute set for Largo July 1.) Navarro said, “31 days ago we lost a precious soul, and it was sudden and it was painful. In all my literally 50 years in the business, I’ve never seen an outpouring cut across communities like this has — pop people, rock people, folk people, LGBTQ people, it didn’t matter. Whoever encountered Jill so loved her because she was that open and that warm.”
The show established just how many people it is possible to get on the tiny McCabe’s stage, which more often is inhabited by solo folk singers than a full session-player unit like the one put together by Steve Postell for the occasion. Postell, a member of the studio-cats band the Immediate Family, was joined by the famous veteran bassist Leland Sklar, along with drummer Michael Jerome and keyboard/accordion player Phil Parlapiano. Postell took the lead vocal on one early song, his reading of “San Francisco,” and admitted that he had not been fully immersed in Sobule’s catalog before taking the assignment (though they’d had the same manager 30 years ago), so he was open-minded when he dipped into it to pick one song to sing himself. He settled quickly on one of her most beautiful melodies, “and then afterwards, I actually read it and realized it’s about human trafficking.” That got a laugh, although the song itself is, as you could guess, not one of her particularly funny ones.
Cindy Lee Berryhill told the story of how she met Sobule when they were performing on the NPR show “Mountain Stage” in the mid- or late ’90s. “We saw each other across the room and we were sizing each other up, because, like, there’s another girl that got signed. I’d been trotted around to the major labels, and she actually snagged one. So we talked and I’m like, ‘Dang, she is really cool.’… She did this song, and it was about the stuff that we were feeling when seeing each other, like, ‘Oh, another songwriter girl.’ It’s a song called ‘Bitter.’ She nailed it. Jill was so cool at that NPR show, and I came away thinking, what’s this bullshit that we have, just because another woman is doing something good?”
(Another very talented artist on the bill, Jesse Lynn Madera, talked about the adjustment to Sobule’s sense of humor that it took for her to get when they were on tour together, when the headliner would actually inject Madera’s name into the “Bitter” lyrics as a potential bitter rival.)
Two artists on the bill sang non-Sobule songs. Willie Aron, of Balancing Act and Thee Holy Brothers fame, performed the Warren Zevon song “Don’t Let Us Get Sick,” which Sobule had covered herself — its faintly prayerful tone coming off as even more poignant in the light of her sudden passing. Batalla, who used to sing with Leonard Cohen, and fraternized with Sobule as they both participated in Hal Willner tribute shows, chose “Bird on a Wire,” because “I always thought of Jill as a hummingbird moving from one fabulous thing to the next and making everything way more beautiful than before she got there.” It stopped the show.
Kay Hanley, of Letters to Cleo, and her songwriting (and SONA) partner Michelle Lewis did the only double-dipping. First, the duo sang “Heroes,” an anthem about being let down by every famous artist you could ever hope to emulate — present company surely excluded — prefaced by Hanley saying, “We picked the song with the most lyrics,, so that you would get your money’s worth from us doing Jill.” Then they explained how the previously mentioned ode to the current vice president’s charms came to be: Lewis actually had the controversial title ready to go when recent circumstances led them to start talking about revived their short-lived supertrio Sugar Tits to come up with more politically charged material. The duo admitted that at least one of them still harbored some concern about how the JD Vance song would draw unwanted attention from some of the parents of the children they usually wrote for nowadays, so their solution was to have the audience shout out the C-word instead of them, as a “Spartacus” kind of thing where everyone and no one is to blame.
The tender, less comical side of Sobule was further represented with a pair of heartbreakers — Madera’s “Somewhere in New Mexico,” a non-believer’s plea into the darkness for just one visible miracle, and Loeb’s “Tomorrow Is Breaking.” Cho also emphasized the pathos over the admitted laughs in “Mexican Wrestler,” the last song the two of them had ever sung together — here at McCabe’s — and which Cho said Sobule had taught her, at her insistence, on both banjo and guitar, while seriously noting that “it’s painful to sing it without her.”
Morello had the most rousing anthem-for-a-generation of the night with “Underdog Victorious,” which he noted was “appropriate at the start of Pride Month,” with its sticking-up-for-the-non-cis-kid narrative of bullying and triumph. “We would often laugh about politics and cry about sports, and vice versa,” said Morello. “I just loved her so much. One of the last texts I received from Jill was a mantra that I think we can all take to heart. She said, ‘I just want to play shows, watch the Broncos, and resist.’”
Resistance got the last word of the night, as the full cast appeared first for the inevitable “I Kissed a Girl” and then the less inevitable “America Back,” in which fingers flew as a full stage group-sang Sobule’s 2017 historical survey that asked the questions: “Before the gays had their agenda, before the slaves were free / Before that man from Kenya took the presidency… / When they say, ‘We want our America back’… Well, what the fuck do they mean?” At this little folk club, it was as close to a good Clash moment as we’re likely to get in 2025.
As Hanley explained of Sobule’s anthem, “She was a very socially active person, but it’s very rare that you hear a songwriter who can sing an entire set of political songs and not sound like an asshole.” There was that sardonically rabble-rousing side, but anyone who had a heart would surely take this music in their arms and truly love her, too.
Setlist for Jillith Fair tribute concert at McCabe’s, Santa Monica, Calif., June 1, 2025:
“When My Ship Comes In” — Dan Navarro
“Don’t Let Us Get Sick” (Warren Zevon cover) — Willie Aron
“Bitter” — Cindy Lee Berryhill
“San Francisco” — Steve Postell
“I’m So Happy” — Amy Engelhardt
“Bird on the Wire” (Leonard Cohen cover) — Perla Batalla
“Somewhere in New Mexico”” — Jesse Lynn Madera
“Heroes” — Kay Hanley and Michelle Lewis
“JD Vance Is a Cunt” — Kay Hanley and Michelle Lewis
“Tomorrow Is Breaking” — Lisa Loeb and David Poe
“Mexican Wrestler” — Margaret Cho
“Underdog Victorious” — Tom Morello
“I Kissed a Girl” — cast
“America Back” — cast
The currently scheduled remaining “Jillith Fair” concerts:
Saturday, June 7^
Evanston, IL @ SPACE
SPACE presents…
Jillith Fair – Loving Jill Sobule
Hosted/MC’d by:
Paul McComas
Featuring:
Gerald Dowd
The Empty Pockets
Heather & Paul McComas
Leslie Nuss
Nikki O’Neill
Ike Reilly
Gabrielle Schafer & Aaron Rester
Anna Vogelzang
Tommi Zender
Saturday, June 14 ^
Oyster Bay, NY @ Planting Fields Festival (not a Jillith Fair event)
A Pride Month event dedicated to the memory of Jill
Saturday, June 21 ^
Philadelphia, PA @ World Cafe Lounge
WXPN Welcomes & World Cafe presents…
Jillith Fair – Loving Jill Sobule
Hosted/MC’d by:
Jim Boggia
Featuring:
Marissa Levy Lerer
Tara Murtha
More TBD
Tuesday, July 1
Los Angeles, CA @ Largo at the Coronet
Largo presents…
Jillith Fair – for the love of Jill – a tribute to our Sunshine Gal
Hosted/MC’d by:
Jim Turner
Featuring:
Charlotte Caffey & Jane Wiedlin (The Go Go’s)
Margaret Cho
John Doe
Sara Watkins (I’m With Her/Nickel Creek/Watkins Family Hour)
More TBD
Wednesday, July 2
Seattle, WA @ Triple Door
Jillith Fair – Loving Jill Sobule
Featuring:
TBD
Sunday, July 20
New York, NY @ Joe’s Pub
Jillith Fair – Loving Jill Sobule
Hosted/MC’d by:
Marykate O’Neil
Featuring:
Antigone Rising w/ Julie Wolf
Richard Barone
Tracy Bonham
Julian Hornik
Matt Keating
Marykate O’Neil
Joan Osborne
Martha Redbone & Aaron Whitby
More TBD
Friday, August 8
Albany, CA @ Ivy Room
(San Francisco Bay area)
Jillith Fair – Loving Jill Sobule
Hosted/MC’d by:
Julie Wolf
Featuring:
TBD
Saturday, September 6
Pittsburgh, PA @ Club Cafe
Jillith Fair – Loving Jill Sobule
Featuring:
TBD
