Tonight we feature Jill Sobule, one of the stellar New York singer songwriters of the last decade. The New York Times has this to say about her music: “Topical, funny and more than a little poignant . . . Sobule provides grown-up music for an adolescent age.” Raina Rose and Rebecca Loebe open the show. Rose is an indie folksinger, armed with constellation tattoos; she has been seen spreading love & trouble across the U.S. In less than three years on the national scene, Loebe has garnered rave reviews for delivering passionate, high-energy performances that weave together skillful, emotional songwriting, folk-storytelling, and whimsical comedy for the ADHD generation.

Jill Sobule belongs to a rare breed of artists. Her work is at once deeply personal and socially conscious, seriously funny and derisively tragic. Over five albums and a decade of recording, the Denver-born songwriter/guitarist/singer has tackled such topics as the death penalty, anorexia, shoplifting, reproduction, the French resistance movement, adolescence, and the Christian right. Did we mention love? Love found, love lost, love wished for and love taken away. While her songs cover a huge amount of ground, they all have benefited greatly from Jill’s subtle intelligence and skillful light-handedness.

Jill played in a variety of funk and rock bands in Colorado, and eventually made her first album which was produced by legendary Todd Rundgren. But success did not knock on her door until three years later, when Atlantic Records released her MTV staple and national top 20 hit, “I Kissed A Girl.” “That song was a double-edged sword for me,” Jill says. “It was perceived as a novelty hit, but on the other hand it was the first song with an overtly gay topic to be aired on Top 40 radio. I am quite proud of that.” Since then, she has made four more critically acclaimed albums, Happy Town, Pink Pearl, Underdog Victorious, and 2009’s California Years, which Jill released on her own record label, Pinko Records, after collecting over $85,000 from fans who funded the project.

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Raina Rose is a boot-stomping singer/songwriter born on the day the music died. She sings Americana-folk songs of long travels, fictional characters, time that plays tricks and the tricks that governments play with a biting honesty. Starting her life in Los Angeles during the Reagan era, her family soon emigrated to lovely Portland, OR where Raina cut her teeth on the notable music scene. Raina took off on tour in late 2005 and has been at it ever since. Thanks to the campfires of the Kerrville Folk Festival, Raina found the draw of the Austin music community too strong and now calls the Live Music Capital of the World her homebase. She let that southern flavor sink in and now serves a brave and heartbreaking brew of fingerpicking, flatpicking, and fresh-voiced stories.

Photo by Merri Lu Park

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Rebecca Loebe is an award-winning indie-folk singer from Atlanta. Since leaving her job as a full-time recording studio engineer, she has performed at music festivals, colleges, coffeehouses, and theaters in over 35 states. At age 16, Rebecca graduated high school early and enrolled at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. After graduating with a degree in Music Production and Engineering she accepted a job as a full-time engineer at a Boston recording studio where she used downtime to record her first full-length album, Hey, It’s a Lonely World. She began playing regionally which led to longer national tours, and on a break in New York, wrote the songs that would become her second release The Brooklyn Series EP. Curious to live as an adult in the town she had left as a teenager, Rebecca returned to Atlanta to begin work on her third studio album, the full-length release Mystery Prize. In 2009 Rebecca was honored as a winner of the Kerrville Folk Festivals New Folk songwriting contest.

Photo by Kate Culver

• This approach — packaging hard-hitting social commentary in a wrapper of whimsy — has defined Sobule’s career. Her endearing story-songs veer from fanciful storytelling to forceful satire and back again, covering a wide range of political and social issues from climate change to prostitution; anorexia to anti-semitism. Her winning combination of memorable characters, clever lyrics and catchy tunes has inspired comparisons that range from Burt Bacharach to Gertrude Stein. It also makes her performances and recordings a delight. TED.com
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• Raina Rose’s new disc, End of Endless False Starts, features some fine acoustic-guitar picking from this Austin-based artist and, with its rootsy undercurrent, will certainly perk the ears of folk-pop enthusiasts. But its collection of musical novellas is really what sets this album apart from Rose’s singer-songwriter contemporaries, as these 12 stories enrapture the listener from first play.
• Rose’s vocal style, a mix of Kasey Chambers’ country twang (“Desire”) and Shawn Colvin’s girlish tone (“Air and Water”), serves as a fine vehicle to relay each vivid tale. Her melodies unleash a torrent of words, and her highly visual sonic portraits run long, sometimes up to six minutes, like the slow-burning, moody “Misaligned Tires.”
• End of Endless False Starts requires the listener to tap the brakes and tune in. It’s not mindless, groove-oriented stuff here, so an appreciation for poetry is a prerequisite. Performing Songwriter
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• Loebe is an amazing singer/songstress with dead-on delivery, powerful and poignant songs. Fran Snyder (CIYH Newsletter)
• If you’re in the mood for sweet and soulful, Rebecca Loebe is your girl. . . . On the back porch of Grape Juice in Kerrville, Loebe serenaded the crowd with what she’s dubbed as “post-bronto­saurus Indie folk/crunk” — an eclectic mixture of unique singer-songwriter and hearty folk, with some Kanye West and Daft Punk thrown in for grins. And although Loebe coined being a singer-songwriter as “a fancy way of saying I’m a well-dressed homeless person,” her voice instantly took my breath away; I was pleasantly surprised at the clarity of her tone accompanied by her crisp, clean acoustic guitar. I could tell right from the start: Rebecca Loebe was born for this. Jeanna Goodrich, Hill Country Explore Magazine