Contact: The Charmed Life of Songwriter Jill Sobule

The imaginative musician on invented characters and her secret love affair with her parents’ LPs.


Jill Sobule at Cowgirl Restaurant. Jacob Blickenstaff

Jill Sobule distinguishes herself from declarative and confessional songwriting by creating musical worlds inhabited by invented characters, often depicted with wry humor and satire. Coupled with a nuanced and educated pop vocabulary—equal parts Beatles, Beach Boys, and Burt Bacharach—she creates the sonic backdrop for her characters with inventive arrangements. She can also rip a mean guitar solo.

On her new album, Dottie’s Charms, Sobule furthers her fictional approach by teaming up with roster of writers including Jonathan Lethem, Luc Sante, David Hadju, and Mary Joe Salterto. Using a charm bracelet found by a friend on eBay, presumably owned by one Dorothy, each writer wrote lyrics inspired by an individual charm (a Canadian penny, a horse stirrup, an office chair, a Statue of Liberty, etc.). Sobule then arranged music to match. The result is a sonically diverse yet surprisingly cohesive portrait of an imagined Dottie, and a sweet and sad life reanimated by trivial tokens.

Jacob Blickenstaff photographed and talked with Sobule at Cowgirl, her old haunt in the Manhattan’s West Village. The following is in her words…

I was a weird kid. Instead of going home to play with friends I would just listen to music from my Close’N Play [record player]. It was either that or, I remember during fourth grade I would just want to watch Watergate coverage.

I had a brother six years older than me so I wasn’t just listening to teenybopper stuff. My brother had the cooler music but my parents had the Burt Bacharach, Tom Jones, the Association, the Fifth Dimension; these groups were un-cool but I secretly loved them. Whereas my friends might listen to the songs, I would spend hours looking at the liner notes and figuring out who did what and listen to the productions. I don’t think other kids would listen and think “Oh, that’s an interesting bass sound.” Whenever I was sick at home my dad would bring me a vinyl record. I remember getting David Bowie’s Station to Station when I had the flu.

You can never get over what you listen to for the very first time, that probably comes out in my music. The new record for instance, there is nostalgia in a charm bracelet. The lyrics on “My Chair” feel Mad Men, so my mind goes to “It’s Not Unusual” [Tom Jones], or Petula Clark. With Sam Lipsyte’s “I Hate Horses,” I’m thinking maybe a Marty Robbins kind of feel. I don’t want to emulate the music but I have these references some girls my age didn’t have.

I like being a storyteller. I’m bored with myself; I like to write about others. I have a lot of names in my songs: Karen, Margaret, Mary Kay. Even if it’s about me I want to put it through someone else. The music is the soundtrack to the story.

With Dottie’s Charms, this is the first time I didn’t write any of the lyrics. I didn’t do a lot of editing, but not everyone had a song form to begin with. Sometimes I would repeat a phrase to create a chorus. The song “Flight” [Vendela Vida] was really wordy. I didn’t want to cut things out so I mostly talked the words for the verse. The album was like a jigsaw puzzle, but what was amazing is how similar the writers’ vision of Dottie was. Her love life has not been great. They all gave her a tough time.

People get to a certain age and success that they stop being curious. I’m still curious because I haven’t really had that success. I’ve never done a record to catch whatever the latest sound is. It’s my love of music, eclectic-ness, and the music that I heard my entire life that seeps in. That’s what you’re hearing.

Film for “O Canada” (Canadian Penny Charm)
(Footage by Sara Zandieh; lyrics by Sara Marcus; music by Jill Sobule and Mike Viola. To listen to the entire album, read the lyrics, see illustrations of Dottie, and watch more films, see this special feature from Harper’s.)

“Contact” is an occasional series of artist profiles by Jacob Blickenstaff.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate