“She played it for us, and we were like, ‘Oh, my God’”: The last song Jill Sobule wrote before her death was entitled JD Vance Is A...

Jill Sobule, perhaps best known for her timely and barrier-breaking I Kissed A Girl and the scathingly satirical Supermodel from the Clueless soundtrack, died tragically in a house fire on 2 May.

The singer had been in preparing a performance of her autobiographical musical, F*ck 7th Grade and – always writing and always musical – the content and theme of her final song have now come to light and will forever be immortalised on social media

First airing the song in March of this year while opening for British new-wave pioneers The Fixx, Sobule described the song to Westword as: “It’s not a big hit, it’s just a really dumb little thing with a lot of words that rhyme with ‘c__t,’” she says. “It’s not radio-friendly. It’s not my best song, but it does get to the point.”

Its title? The catchy and more than a little punchy J.D. Vance Is a C__t. And it proved so popular that she’d taken to performing it solo at her merch-booth after each show.

The song was written earlier in March with her friend Michelle Lewis and her regular co-writing partner, former Letters to Cleo frontperson Kay Hanley. The trio had informally colluded as the band Sugar Tits and pounced upon Sobule’s in-progress work which primarily featured words that ended in “unt”…

“Runt,” “Blunt,” “Brunt,” “Emily Blunt…” You get the idea.

“She played it for us, and we were like, ‘Oh, my God,’” Hanley told Rolling Stone. “Michelle and I came up with background parts and we filmed it and I started a TikTok account for Sugar Tits and just threw it up.”

Tragically the two-minute video of Sugar Tits singing J.D. Vance Is a C__t above had been approaching one million views on Facebook, reigniting interest in Sobule’s caustic but always melodic wit, and setting the scene for the release of the original cast recording of F*ck 7th Grade which will still be going ahead next month.

“It’s not easy to write political songs without sounding like an asshole or preachy or, holier than thou, and it’s really difficult to do that especially for women,” says Hanley. “But she was so funny, sweet and smart that you just couldn’t be pissed at her. When claws came out for other sorts of liberal activists, Jill seemed to avoid some of that because of the way she was. She was like pixie dust.”

“The fact that the song has struck a chord is maybe because we’re not hearing a lot of songwriters who are brave enough to criticize [the Trump team],” explains Sobule collaborator, journalist, cartoonist, and musician Bill DeMain.

“And humor is one of the things that really bothers Trump. It’s why he gets so mad at Jimmy Kimmel or Saturday Night Live, because he doesn’t know how to laugh, so he’s furious. She acknowledged it was just kind of a silly little throwaway thing, but it’s something people will be talking about.”

With Sobule no longer with us to perform the song – which had become a regular fixture of her Fixx opener set – it’s uncertain as to what will happen to her final, unrecorded work.

Sobule had compiled an album of modern protest songs entitled Monster Protest Jamz (Volume 1) featuring her own songs alongside contributions from Jackson Browne, Tom Morello, Graham Nash, and more. It’s likely that the song could fit on a second possible volume. “She kept adding verses to it,” said her manager John Porter. “It turns out that lots of things rhyme that were apropos.”

For now, however, the song's audio only exists on a social media video shot in Lewis’ living room. “The plan was to make social media videos, because the topics of Sugar Tits songs are what’s in the news now,” explains Hanley.

“It’s not really stuff you’re meant to dwell on. J.D. Vance Is a C__t is great video to look at, take in, laugh at it, and then let it leave your consciousness.”