When I received the package for California Years, the latest CD from Jill Sobule, I was excited. I wasn’t necessarily a big fan, though I did fondly recall her 1995 hit “I Kissed a Girl” and what a controversy it caused back then. I was more interested in the fact that Sobule produced this CD completely with contributions from her fans and that she seemed to use a public radio model for her fundraising. (To find out more, about the concept and its execution, click here.) Instead of giving out coffee mugs and tote bags in exchange for donations, Sobule offered things like free digital downloads of her CD for a $10 donation. $50 got you an advanced copy of the record AND a thank you in the liner notes. For $200, donors got free tickets to all of her shows for the year. For $1,000 Jill Sobule would write and record a theme song for you. Three people contributed $5,000, for that Sobule performed a private house concert for each of them. And one fan contributed $10,000 and got to sing on the song Mexican Pharmacy. We’ll hear that song (plus lots of others) and hear from Jo Pottinger, the big donor herself about making her recording debut.
-Chad
She is so brilliant.