Sophie B. Hawkins

Thinking about the Sugarcubes made me think about some of the other music I liked in the early ninties. I was young and in school and this was years before I first heard the Pixies and Throwing Muses and Sugar.

As a kid I liked Madonna, Prince, and Cyndi Lauper. Slowly I got into rock music, mainly through the Divinyls. I also got Siouxsie and the Banshees's Peepshow and kd lang's Ingenue.

One night I was in bed listening to the radio on headphones, which I did most weeknights when I was a kid, and "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover" by Sophie B. Hawkins came on. I loved it and the next day I went to the mall and bought her debut Tongues and Tails. I liked it a lot and to this day are there still songs that I think are good, including "I Want You", which I like much more than Bob Dylan's version.

That summer I saw an ad for a show she was doing about an hour away in Lee, MA at the Berkshire Performing Arts Center. I got a ticket for myself and one for my best friend Paula. My parents are great- they drove us out there and went for dinner while we watched the show- it was really nice of them to go along with it.

What most sticks out in my mind is before the show started crew went out and lit incense sticks and candles around the front of the stage. I also remember SBH announced that this was the second show she'd ever played- the first had been the night before at Toad's Place in New Haven, CT. The name stuck with me and came to mind years later when I got my licence and went there to see Frank Black during the tour for Teenager of the Year.

I got SBH's second album, Whaler, when it came out but I was disappointed. It was heavy on keyboards and few of the songs had the full-band sound that I liked about the first record.

Years later, my friend Jeff and I were talking about the IFC channel and what was going to be on that night. I mentioned the documentary about SBH, The Cream Will Rise and we agreed, it was a dumb idea- "She had, like, one song, right?"

Once I caught a couple minutes ago and she was being a real dick to members of her band. I turned to something else.

I don't know much about her later career except that she had a lot of record company conflicts and that back when Hillary Clinton was trying for the Democratic nomination SBH recorded a new version of her old hit, "Damn I Wish You Were President".

I just watched the video on Youtube, or at least as much as I could; both the song and the video were very lame. For the clip someone follows her around a park with a camera and she sings "A woman's place is in the White House" while a woman holds up a bumper sticker saying the same thing.