Singer Jill Sobule, known for the 1995 song “I Kissed a Girl,” died in a Minnesota house fire Thursday morning, her representatives said. She was 66.
The fire occurred in Woodbury, a city around 16 miles east of Minneapolis, they said. Officials there said firefighters discovered a dead woman after a house fire that was reported around 5:30 a.m. Thursday.
“Jill Sobule was a force of nature and human rights advocate whose music is woven into our culture,” manager John Porter said in a statement.
“I Kissed a Girl” reached No. 20 on Billboard’s modern rock chart and was the first openly queer-themed record to reach Billboard’s Top 20.
Sobule’s song “Supermodel” from the “Clueless” soundtrack was also a pop success.
Sobule most recently created a coming-of-age musical, “F— 7th Grade,” an off-Broadway show that debuted in 2022. It was a Drama Desk nominee for “outstanding musical” the next year and was named a New York Times Critic Pick.
Sobule had been scheduled to perform Friday in Denver at Swallow Hill, where an informal gathering will now be held to remember her instead, her reps said.
In 2008, Katy Perry released “I Kissed a Girl,” which was not a cover of Sobule’s song. After Sobule made comments that she said were deliberately over-the top and ironic, she was targeted by Perry fans who took the comments seriously.
“I may be a touch cynical about the business, but I have never really been angry or had ill feelings towards Katy herself,” Sobule wrote on what was then known as The Huffington Post. “I was actually in a small way happy to not be the ‘Kissed a Girl’ girl anymore.”
She said she hoped Perry fans were “okay with the title of my brand new song, ‘I Kissed a Girl …First,’” she wrote, adding “Wink.”
Sobule is survived by her brother and sister-in-law, James and Mary Ellen Sobule, and her nephews, Ian Matthew and Robert and Robert’s wife Irina, her reps said.
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