Jill Sobule back with long-awaited new album

“Nostalgia can be wonderful and amazing. It’s OK to look back. But then you gotta get the f-out of there,” says Jill Sobule, on the theme of her new album, Nostalgia Kills (out now).

Listen here, and check out Jill’s video “I Don’t Wanna Wake Up,” written after a breakup, “the night a friend gave me some mushrooms, so I was mircodosing.” adds Sobule. On Nostalgia Kills, she is “exorcising some junior high school demons.

"There were things that happened in my life -- the death of a parent, a breakup, a move. I was my own procrastinatrix, is what I call it,” Sobule told Billboard. “But I think those kind of jostle you back into the creative mode, and I started loving music again -- loving listening, loving writing and the original spirit of why I did this in the first place, I suppose.”

Produced by her good friend, Australian singer-songwriter Ben Lee, with a supporting cast of players that included John Doe (X), Wayne Kramer (The MC5), Petra Haden (That Dog), Roger Joseph Manning Jr. (Jellyfish), and Richard Barone (The Bongos), Nostalgia Kills was pulled from 100 songs, representing nearly a decade’s worth of material since the release of her last proper solo album, California Years (2009).

Looking back is a new experience for Jill Sobule. Ever since she first caught mainstream attention with her 1995 song “I Kissed a Girl” — the first song about same-sex romance ever to crack the Billboard Top 20 (and no relation to the later Katy Perry tune) — she’s always pushed forward, exploring new sounds and subject matter with each passing album and refusing to be pigeonholed by her early hits (which also include the ‘90s alt-rock anthem “Supermodel,” featured in an iconic scene in the film Clueless).

For all its graceful, funny and heartbreaking explorations of awkward youth and grown-up regrets, Nostalgia Killsis as of-the-moment as anything in Jill Sobule’s catalog. Through her own experiences, she explores issues our society still collectively struggles with (LGBTQ rights, teen mental health, our unhealthy obsession with staying forever young) and gently skewers our tendency to dwell on the past at the expense of addressing the present. As she sings on the title track: “We look at ourselves in a long row of mirrors/We get smaller and smaller with each passing year/We have to keep moving or die.”

Tour dates:

Sept 20 Evanston, IL Space
Sept 21 Ann Arbor, MI The Ark
Oct 4 Los Angeles, CA Largo at the Coronet
Nov 9 St. Louis, MO Duck Room at Blueberry Hill
Nov 17 Boulder, CO Etown Hall
Dec 22 Hopewell, NJ The Hopewell Theater
Feb 1 Marblehead, MA Me & Thee Coffeehouse

jillsobule.com