I heard this song today on some AAA station. I wanted to post the lyrics for consideration, but they don't seem to be available on the web yet. Not that I think they're *particularlry* good -- in fact, everything is pretty badly phrased. But I thought the sentiment was one I haven't heard expressed in a song.
From what I can remember, the song is short and includes the pretty lame refrain "I live like a freshman/I still have a roommate," and that's rhymed with something about still cooking food on a hot plate. But then there's a part that sort of touched me, where she says something about how "I followed my dreams" and "you" didn't, and something like,"You own your own building/and a flatscreen TV," and how she is actually envious and regretful.
The music is not great either, cheaply produced songwriter pop going into a bridge of faux-Joni Mitchell pseudo sophistication, but the song still left an impression on me. Maybe I just wish a more gifted songwriter had come up with the idea.
― Hurting (Hurting), Friday, 5 November 2004 02:15 (twenty-one years ago)
four years pass...
five years pass...
one year passes...
five years pass...
I heard Things Here Are Different in 1990, due to the Rundgren connection, and listened to it again recently for the Todd productions poll. Responding to john above, certainly she's more folky than the artists he would usually work with, but some of the string arrangements and guitar textures have a Skylarking feel.
I gather that this record is an exception in her career for its earnest approach, her followups were more quirky and witty.
― Halfway there but for you, Friday, 12 March 2021 20:30 (four years ago)
four years pass...
This Jewish Telegraphic Agency obit adds details about her life I didn't know about:
Sobule, who grew up as the only Jewish student at her Catholic school in Denver...
Sobule grew up as what she told Lilith Magazine was as a “Denver Jew, third generation from the Old Country,” saying that her family practiced a secular and perhaps sanitized version of Judaism. “We were to Judaism,” she told the magazine in 2023, “what Olive Garden was to Italian restaurants.”
She also recalled that her first stage performance was as “Miss Hanukkah and Queen Esther” in a school production when she was in first grade. After her turn atop the pop charts, she would return to Jewish themes in a wide array of musical and stage projects.
She was a repeat participant in the Downtown Seder, a musical Passover performance held annually in New York City.
She performed in a revue of “Fiddler on the Roof” songs at a Jewish music festival in New York in 2007 alongside the Klezmatics and Theodore Bikel, who was synonymous with the lead character Tevye.
And in 2016, she made headlines by composing the music for a new staging of “Yentl,” the Isaac Bashevis Singer story about a gender-bending yeshiva student propelled into the popular consciousness by the 1986 movie of the same name starring Barbra Streisand.
Sobule said she valued “Yentl” as a depiction of transgenderism but had been struck by learning that Singer was unhappy with the movie and sought to address his objections by having the music come from “a Jewish chorus” instead of being sung by the characters.
“I think he would approve of my music,” she told NPR at the time. “I really do, because it keeps the spirit of the play, and it has a sense of humor. I think he actually would like it because it doesn’t feel intrusive.”
And in 2022, she played both a cantor and the rabbi’s wife in “A Wicked Soul in Cherry Hill,” a staging of the true story of the New Jersey rabbi convicted of arranging the murder of his wife. In a play abhorred by the family of the real victim, she delivered the “standout performance,” according to a review in the Los Angeles Times. (The rabbi died last year.)
Sobule’s latest project was “F–k 7th Grade,” an autobiographical musical about being queer in middle school that was well reviewed during its off-Broadway run in New York City. She had been scheduled to perform songs from the musical in Denver on Friday, in a venue that will now host an informal memorial service.
https://www.jta.org/2025/05/02/obituaries/jill-sobule-pop-star-who-also-composed-songs-for-a-new-yentl-dies-at-66
― curmudgeon, Friday, 2 May 2025 18:01 (seven months ago)
seven months pass...