As a recording artist, Jill Sobule has been through it all over the past 20 years: two major-label deals, collaborations with big-name producers (Todd Rundgren on her 1990 debut, Things Here Are Different; Joe Jackson on the follow-up, never released), a couple of pop/MTV hits (including “I Kissed a Girl,” which predated by 13 years Katy Perry’s supposedly groundbreaking song with the same name), several critically and creatively successful records that earned her no money beyond the advance, and two labels that went belly-up. In the wake of all this, Sobule says, “the thought of going to another label and trying to shop myself—I just wanted to shoot myself, basically.”

In considering alternatives to traditional labels, Sobule’s first thought was to have fans be stockholders in a new studio record but she soon realized that the legalities were daunting. She took note of the website SellaBand (sellaband.com), where fans invest money in an unsigned artist’s record, but felt it was “kind of generic. So I thought, ‘make it really personal.’”

And that’s what she did in launching Jill’s Next Record (jillsnextrecord.com), where fans could help finance her latest studio project, California Years, at various donation levels with accompanying perks—ranging from Unpolished Rock ($10), for which a donor would get a download of the finished album, to Weapons-Grade Plutonium ($10,000), which earned the chance to sing on it. For $500, Gold donors got their names mentioned in the CD’s closing track, while the $750 Gold Doubloons level was “exactly like the Gold level, but you give me more money.” This disarmingly witty pitch soon brought Sobule more than $85,000 for recording, packaging, manufacturing, and publicizing the record—people kept giving even after her goal of $75,000 was reached. And she wound up with some unusual tasks on her to-do list, such as writing 15 theme songs for Platinum ($1,000) donors and playing house concerts for the Diamond ($5,000) level.

The Personal Touch

Reflecting on her success with the Jill’s Next Record venture, Sobule cites an Internet-era spin on Andy Warhol’s proclamation that in the future everyone is going to be famous for 15 minutes. “In this day [and age],” she says, “everyone’s going to be famous for 15 people.” Sobule’s songs, with their playful hooks and funny-sad stories of underachievers and square pegs, had already drawn an intensely loyal audience. On her site, Sobule spoke to fans in a similarly intimate way—even including notes from her mom and other personal asides. “I have a good relationship with the fans and I always write back,” she says. “I wanted this to be as close a connection as possible and have people participate, because I put people who follow me up on a pedestal in a way—God, they’re the ones who have kept me afloat and not having a real job—and I actually think they’re really smart.”

The Production

One thing that Sobule communicated right from the start about California Years is that she intended to “make something that kicks ass” (footnoted as a “technical music industry term”) rather than a cheap-as-possible production. Her up-front fan support allowed her to line up Don Was as producer, as well as top session players such as fret wizard Greg Leisz and drummer Jim Keltner, and to book Henson Recording Studios, the former A&M studio where Carole King’s Tapestry and Joni Mitchell’s Blue were made. All of the studio personnel (and others such as the artist Maira Kalman, who contributed the cover illustration) worked for less than their usual label rates, Sobule says, to support her DIY venture.

“I wanted to get a kind of sound and vibe using Keltner and a couple of my favorite old-timey session players,” she says. “I don’t know if I’ll ever do it again. The studios are going out of business—no one can really afford to go. It felt almost like my last hurrah. The thing was, because I couldn’t afford to stay there, the record was done really fast. We did everything live during the tracking. We did it in a week, which was great. You can hear there are some clams and some uneven things, but I think that gives it its charm.”

The Preview

Once the tracks were ready, Sobule brought donors into the process by inviting them to stream all the mixes on a secret page at the Jill’s Next Record site. Since she’d recorded more songs than would go on the final CD, she asked them to pick their favorite six tracks and share any other feedback. “That was really great,” she says. “I loved the ones that were like, ‘Well, the EQ in the fifth bar . . . ’”

The songs on California Years, the inaugural release for Sobule’s Pinko Records, find the singer-songwriter taking stock of her recent move to LA after many years in New York. Don Was’s production brings her voice and acoustic guitar—mostly a parlor-size Collings—very close to the listener’s ear. And Sobule’s storytelling is, as always, memorably offbeat, whether she’s portraying an immigrant masseuse in “San Francisco” or wondering “Where Is Bobbie Gentry?” in a funky track that echoes “Ode to Billie Joe” and reveals, “I was the baby who was thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge.” The CD makes reference to her music-biz travails, too; she sings about “trying to impress someone at a dying record company” at a meeting in 2006 and concludes with a feisty sing-along: “Nothing to prove / Nothing to prove / Once I was as miserable as you . . . I’ve got nothing to prove.”

The final track on California Years, as promised, lists the Gold donors by name over a bossa-nova guitar groove, with a gesture of gratitude and humility that recalls the age of court musicians and royal patrons. That historical connection makes sense to Sobule, who says that the idea behind Jill’s Next Record was, in part, to find “the new Medicis.” She adds, “I wish there was a king these days and I was a court musician. I’ll be a loyalist.”

Power to the People

In talking with other musicians about her fan-financing experiment, Sobule has found that not everyone is comfortable with, for instance, the notion of playing concerts at fans’ homes. “Some people feel that you have to have that kind of curtain between the audience and the musician, but I’ve never felt that,” she says. “One time someone asked me if I had any stalkers, and I jokingly said yeah—and I put them to work. They’re not really stalkers, but big fans. I’ve had people come and sell merch for me. There’s one girl that I’m going to have help with one of my websites—great.”

With this grassroots approach, Sobule has no expectation of hitting the MTV Top Ten again—and finds that liberating. “I feel good personally, because I never really made a cent on a record ever before,” she says. “You know, people can use this model whether they have 100 fans or 100,000 fans. You don’t have to have a gold- or platinum-selling album to be successful, because you don’t have to worry about the record company selling so much. The first record I sell, that first $10 I sell at a show or online, it’s mine.”

At this point, Sobule is the sole employee of Pinko Records, but in the future she hopes her label will become a space where music lovers can discover other artists and also support their recording projects. She doesn’t claim any crystal-ball clarity about the record business, but feels optimistic about the approach of going directly to the people who want the music. “We’ll see how far I go,” she says. “It’s a new world.”