Jill Sobule, singer-songwriter known for ’90s pop hit ‘I Kissed a Girl,’ dies in house fire at 66

Jill Sobule, the singer and songwriter whose 1995 hit “I Kissed a Girl” was the rare pop song of that era to take an openly queer theme into the cultural mainstream, died Thursday. She was 66.

Her death was announced by her spokesman, David Elkin, who said she died in a house fire in the Minneapolis suburb of Woodbury. Sobule had been on tour and was scheduled to play a hometown concert Friday night in Denver.

With a sharp wit and a playwright’s dramatic sense, Sobule wrote about characters squaring their internal lives with the way the world views them, and she had a flair for vividly drawn scenes in which people make discoveries about themselves.

“I Kissed a Girl,” which puts a bouncy folk-pop groove beneath Sobule’s lightly raspy vocal, opens with two friends hanging out one night as they compare notes on their disappointing boyfriends. Soon they’re drinking and smoking and the narrator’s friend takes off her overcoat. Sobule, who identified as bisexual, sings:

She called home to say she’d be late

He said he’d worried but now he’d feel safe

I’m glad you’re with your girlfriend

Tell her hi for me

And then I looked at you

You had guilt in your eyes

But it only lasted a little while

And then I felt your hand above my knee

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“I Kissed a Girl,” which came out as the lead single from Sobule’s self-titled 1995 LP, reached the top 20 of Billboard’s alternative radio chart and peaked at No. 67 on the all-genre Hot 100; the song’s music video, starring the model Fabio as one of the crummy boyfriends, was nominated for two prizes at MTV’s Video Music Awards. Sobule’s self-titled album also spawned the punky “Supermodel,” which was featured on the soundtrack of that year’s hit “Clueless” movie.

Sobule was part of a mid-’90s cohort of clever songwriters that included Juliana Hatfield, Lisa Loeb and Liz Phair, whose success could be seen as a reaction to the gloomy, male-dominated grunge craze of a few years earlier. Yet Sobule recognized the persistent sexism that followed her and her peers onto television and the covers of magazines.

“I love the way they try to pit us against each other — like it’s ‘Dynasty’ and we’re gonna get in a Joan Collins/Linda Evans fight,” she joked to The Times in 1995. “Me and Sheryl Crow, going at it!”

Sobule was born in Denver in 1959 and played guitar in her high school jazz band. Studying abroad while in college, she was spotted by a nightclub owner as she and a friend performed on the street in Madrid; he invited them to play his club, and she dropped out of school a month later.

In 1990, Sobule made a debut album with Todd Rundgren for MCA Records that went nowhere despite plenty of critical praise. (Writing in The Times, Chris Willman called it “as accomplished a debut as you’ll hear this year.”) MCA dropped her before releasing a second LP she’d made with Joe Jackson.

“It was a really hard time in my life,” Sobule told The Times in 1995. “I mean, I had no other skills, aside from having studied political science.”

Atlantic signed her for “Jill Sobule” then released its 1997 follow-up, “Happy Town,” which failed to yield another pop hit.

Yet Sobule continued to record and perform, and she established a career in television that included the theme song for Nickelodeon’s “Unfabulous.” In 2009 she published a piece on the Huffington Post in which she explained tongue-in-cheek remarks she’d made in an earlier interview about Katy Perry, who’d topped the Hot 100 the previous year with a different song called “I Kissed a Girl.”

“I may be a touch cynical about the business, but I have never really been angry or had ill feelings towards Katy herself,” she wrote. “I was actually in a small way happy to not be the ‘Kissed a Girl’ girl anymore.”

For her 2014 album, “Dottie’s Charms,” Sobule wrote songs to lyrics she commissioned from writers such as Jonathan Lethem, David Hajdu and Vendela Vida.

“I’m an older woman who’s not going to have a shiny pop song ever again, so that gives me license to do whatever the hell I want,” she told the New York Times with a laugh.

Sobule’s most recent project was an autobiographical coming-of-age musical called “F*ck7thGrade” whose original cast recording is due for release in June. Her survivors include a brother and several nephews.