[ATTENDED: December 22, 2018] Jill Sobule
A friend of mine had told me about the newly renovated Hopewell Theater and how it was a great little venue. And then I saw that Jill Sobule was playing there.
Jill Sobule had a couple of hits in the 90s (she wrote “I Kissed a Girl” before Katy Perry did). She bubbled under the radar for a number of years and during that time she released some fantastic albums. Her songs have always been catchy and smart. Many of her lyrics are funny but pointed. And while she’s pretty firmly rooted in the folk scene, her albums tend to rock more than not, with a few ballads tucked in as well.
Over the last decade or so, she’s been quieter, but it turns out she never stopped writing and she’s back with a new album and a one woman show called “#Fuck7thGrade.”
Plus, Hopewell is only 25 minutes from our house.
The theater was lovely, very cozy. The seating arrangement was a little odd. They have a dozen or so small tables with four seats around them. And then rows of seats behind them. When I pre-ordered tickets, I picked one of the tables, but not the front row.
Up on stage was Jill’s electric guitar. And then after a few minutes she came onto the stage (there was no opening act).
She walked around the stage with her big acoustic guitar and, sensing the size of the room, asked if she could do a couple of songs unmic’d. Of course she could.
So she started out with “Resistance Song” and she sounded amazing–exactly the same! This is a deep cut that I’ve always liked, but which Id forgotten about. It was so much fun to hear it.
Then she introduced her new sing-along, the rather pointed and right on, “When They Say They Want Our America Back, What the Fuck Do They Mean?” We sang along and mocked the stupid racists.
Then she switched over to the tiny acoustic guitar and sang into the mic for the rest of the set (she never did use that big electric guitar).
She was full of funny off the cuff songs, like the one she says she wrote as a kid: “Jesus Was a Dreidel Spinner,” which she played for us as the first ever holiday song that she wrote. But in keeping with the holiday spirit, she then sang one of our favorite holiday songs, “Merry Christmas from the Family” (the Robert Earl Keen song). It is funny and dark and sweet and really captures the holiday perfectly.
She also has a new album out and she played a bunch of songs from it. Since I didn’t know them yet, I couldn’t keep track of the set list, but she played about five or six new ones.
Then she introduced her guest for the night. Jim _______. He has played with her in the past, but I couldn’t hear his last name and can’t find any info about him online. He was fantastic. A great musician and a very funny guy. He did a lot of impromptu jokes–musical and otherwise. And he played a great guitar and ukulele.
I’m unclear how much time they had to play together before the show. There were a lot of requests, so he couldn’t have known everything. Much of the time, he played tasteful guitar fills to balance out Jill’s chords. But I’m sure he knew some of the songs already. Like the news one “I Don’t Wanna Wake Up” on which he played guitar. He switched to the uke for “I Put My Headphones On” which segued rather nicely into “Ooh Child”
I deliberately hadn’t listened to any Jill before the show because I knew there were dozens of songs I would be happy to hear and I didn’t want to get my hopes up. When the show turned into a more or less request show I was bummed that I couldn’t think of any song titles. But I was super excited that she played “Bitter” which is one of my favorite songs of hers.
I feel like I missed a bit of banter, because Jill started talking about a musical, Foreigner which Jim jokes was a covers album of Foreigner songs, and he launched into “Cold as Ice.”
Along with her new songs, she talked about how she had written a living will, but this was a musical living will. This song was called “Unplug Me.” She said she’d like to make it available to anyone who wants it–it can be customized for individual needs.
She played a few new songs and then someone requested “Supermodel” which I was also super psyched to hear.
I had forgotten about “Good Person Inside” from the same album as “Kissed” and I had forgotten how much I loved the melody and lyrics: [sung all happy and upbeat] “you haven’t killed anyone as far as we know and you seem very nice to your sister….”
When she got ready to play the big hit, she told us that she was going to insert someone’s name into the lyrics. She picked the woman at the table in front of ours–the one I was going to buy but decided not to. So I could now be linking to “I Kissed Mrs Debraski” instead of the admittedly hilarious “I Kissed Helen Greenberg.” Helen and her table had a great reaction to the song. And after the show, while we were waiting to meet Jill, Helen insisted she actually get a kiss. Which she did.
Jill told us that when she wrote “When They Say…” some troll had bashed her and called her a commie pinko dyke or some such thing. She was sick of the internet trolls so she wrote a song for this guy and sent it to him. It’s called “It’s Just As Easy To Be Nice As It Is To Be An Asshole” and features the lyric: “I get you don’t like me, I think I can tell / the vitriol, the words that you misspelled / you could be a 10 year old or a drunk old man.” her rcord label is called Pinko Records too, heh.
Someone had requested “Underdog Victorious” and we all sang along to that last song of the night. She left the stage but came back a few seconds later strumming that big old acoustic again. She and Jim did a walking-around-the-stage version of “When My Ship Comes In.” They fairly rocked it out with some good guitar hero poses and everything.
The show was so much fun and we were thrilled that we went. And yes we were even more thrilled that we’d be home in 25 minutes.
Jill told us she’d sign some merch and sure enough we waited a few minutes and she came out. She was so friendly and personable. She signed her new album and I had brought a copy of Pink Pearl and she signed that for me too.
She’s an excellent and engaging live performer and I highly encourage seeing her.
And I highly encourage the Hopewell Theater to get more live shows like this one. I can think of dozens of great up and coming or unheralded performers who would fit there perfectly!
Sort of the set list:
- Resistance Song
- When They Say They Want Our America Back, What the Fuck Do They Mean?
- Jesus Was a Dreidel Spinner
- Merry Christmas From the Family
- I Don’t Wanna Wake Up
- I Put My Headphones On
- Ooh Child
- Island of Lost Things
- Bitter
- Cold as Ice
- Unplug Me
- 25 Cents (The End Is Near)
- The Party’s Over Party Girl
- Supermodel
- Good Person Inside
- I Kissed a Girl
- It’s Just As Easy To Be Nice As It Is To Be An Asshole
- Underdog Victorious
encore - When My Ship Comes In
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