Kissed a Girl singer Jill Sobule, the first to crack the top 20 with an openly gay song, dies in house fire

A popular US singer has died in tragic circumstances - just one day after sharing a darkly “prophetic” final post on social media.

Folk pop artist Jill Sobule, the first songwriter to crack the US top 20 with an openly gay song, has tragically died at 66 in a house fire.

Sobule slayed the global charts and airwaves in 1995 with her upbeat earworm I Kissed a Girl, 13 years before Katy Perry released her hit with the same title.

The artist’s manager confirmed to American music media the singer had died in the fire at her home in Minnesota on Thursday.

She was in the midst of an American tour, and was scheduled to perform three concerts across Colorado in the coming days.

“Jill Sobule was a force of nature and human rights advocate whose music is woven into our culture,” her manager John Porter wrote in a press release.

“I was having so much fun working with her. I lost a client and a friend today. I hope her music, memory, and legacy continue to live on and inspire others.”

Jill Sobule in Sydney in 1997 to promote her album Happy/Town. Picture: NCA.

And what was to be Sobule’s final post on social media is especially eerie following her death.

Two days ago, she shared a post on Instagram admitting it had been “hard being on tour,” complaining that she had “somehow messed u [her] back and have sciatica.”

The post accompanying her caption was a cartoon showing musical mermaids complaining about “luring sailors to their deaths.”

Fans flooded to the post after news broke of Sobule’s death, one calling it “prophetic in the worst way possible.”

Jill Sobule's final post on Instagram, shared two days ago.

Sobule, who identified as bisexual, was part of a vanguard of female singer songwriters including Sheryl Crow, Lisa Loeb and Juliana Hatfield, who stormed the charts in the mid 1990s with their genre-bending pop songs with lyrics ripped from their diaries.

I Kissed A Girl peaked in the top 20 of the US Billboard charts and placed in Triple J’s Hottest 100 in 1995.

She followed up that hit with Supermodel, one of the standout-outs tracks on the soundtrack for the now classic film Clueless.

The songwriter told Philadelphia Gay News a few years ago that she had feared I Kissed a Girl wouldn’t make it onto her self-titled third album because of homophobia within the major label boardrooms.

Sobule feared “Kissed a Girl” wouldn’t make her album. Picture: Supplied.

“(When) I got my record deal and I was sitting in a conference room getting ready to have the first big meeting … they said, ‘We’ve already had Tracy Chapman and Melissa Etheridge. Thank God we finally have a straight, female singer-songwriter.’ It freaked me out,” she told the queer publication in 2021.

“When ‘Kissed a Girl’ came out, I didn’t even think it was going to make it onto the record, but it came out and was treated like a novelty.

“For me, I wanted it out because it was the kind of song I wish I’d heard when I was young.”

Sobule visited Australia once at the height of her fame, joking years later about appearing on Hey Hey It’s Saturday.

“I was on Hey Hey!” she told Double J in 2017. “I remember the puppet and the guy with the cowboy hat.

“It was the only time I ever lip-synched, I’d never lip-synched before. They asked me what kind of band I wanted. I’m like, ‘what do you mean?’. They were like ‘How do you want them to look?’ None of them really played music because they didn’t have to. ‘Do you want an all girl band? Do you want a really rock looking band?’.

“They had a book of these people that I could pick. It was amazing and absurd at the same time.”

Sobule was also ahead of her time in terms of leaving the major label machine to pursue her recording career as an independent artist.

She was one of the first singer songwriters to engage fans to crowd-fund her recording projects before the launch of platforms such as Kickstarter, kicking off with her seventh album, California Years, in 2009.

Sobule was midway through an American tour when she lost her life in the fire.

Originally published as Kissed a Girl singer Jill Sobule, the first to crack the top 20 with an openly gay song, dies in house fire