Songfacts®:

• In 1995, 13 years before Katy Perry had her "breakout hit with the same title," the Denver-born singer-songwriter Jill Sobule released "I Kissed A Girl," a song about a soon-to-be married woman who shares a spontaneous kiss with a female friend... and likes it!
  
  The song is lighthearted and fun, which earned it airplay at a time when gay rights - particularly gay marriage - was a very contentious issue in America. A Gallup poll showed that in 1996, 68% of Americans were opposed to gay marriage. It wasn't until 2004 that one state - Massachusetts - made it legal for gay couples to marry, and it wasn't legalized nationally until 2015.
  
  The characters in Sobule's song weren't trying to get married, and it didn't come off as politically motivated (she even sings, "Kissed a girl won't change the world"), but the song was a step toward acceptance, opening the gates to more portrayals of gay and lesbian relationships in music, movies and TV. This was important to Sobule, who was openly bisexual and a staunch supporter of LGBT rights. By the time Katy Perry released her "I Kissed A Girl," a song that's also about an exploratory kiss, the subject matter didn't raise eyebrows.
• After Katy Perry's song scored, Sobule did her best to take the high road, telling Hollywood Insider that she didn't feel "precious" about the title but she'd received "tons of e-mails from annoyed fans." She admitted to The Rumpus that it "did bug me a little bit" when Perry said she came up with the idea for the title in a dream. "In truth, she wrote it with a team of professional writers and was signed by the very same guy that signed me in 1995," Sobule said. "I have not mentioned that in interviews as I don't want to sound bitter or petty... 'cause, that's not me."
  
  However, in the very next sentence, an angry Sobule expressed her frustration, accusing Perry of being a "f---ing stupid, maybe 'not good for the gays,' title thieving, haven't heard much else, so not quite sure if you're talented, f---ing little slut."
  
  This wasn't the last time Perry appropriated a song title. Her "Roar" has a chorus that goes, "I got the eye of the tiger, a fighter..."
  
  Perry did gain acceptance in the LGBT community, earning an award from the Human Rights Campaign in 2017.
• What happened after she kissed a girl? We can tell from the line "They can have their diamonds and we'll have our pearls" that the woman in the song has decided that girls are the way to go. Men (wealthy ones, anyway) can supply diamond, but only other women can supply pearls, a reference to... well, in the classic song "Spill The Wine" by the '70s band War, Eric Burdon sings, "Spill the wine, take that pearl," with the same meaning.
• "I Kissed A Girl" didn't make many playlists in the Bible Belt but did pretty well in more progressive areas and got a fair amount of airplay on MTV. The song climbed to #67 on the Hot 100 in July 1995.
• Jill Sobule's "I Kissed A Girl" can stake a claim as the first chart hit that's overtly about an intimate relationship between two women. The 1992 Sophie B. Hawkins hit "Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover" covers the same ground, but most listeners assumed the lover was a man (you have to listen carefully to the lyrics to ascertain it's really a woman). Melissa Etheridge came out as gay in 1993 but kept her songs gender-neutral - "I'm the Only One" and "Come to My Window" for example.
• Sobule wrote this song with Robin Eaton, a male Nashville-based songwriter she often collaborated with.
• The music video is very Pee-wee's Playhouse, with a colorful, whimsical set where Sobule plays a housewife who forms an attraction to Jenny, the housewife next door. Jenny's husband is played by Fabio, a romance-novel cover model who made the cover of People magazine in 1993.
• Sobule released her first album, Things Here Are Different, in 1990 on MCA Records. She was dropped by the label but picked up by the Atlantic Records subsidiary Lava, which issued "I Kissed A Girl" as the first single from her self-titled 1995 album. The next single, "Supermodel," was on the soundtrack to the movie Clueless but didn't chart, and Sobule spent the next decade or so bouncing around record labels before going the crowdfunding route in 2008, the same year Katy Perry landed with her "I Kissed A Girl." In 2019 she wrote and performed a song for a Marge Simpson lumberjill montage on The Simpsons. In 2025 she died in a house fire at 66.