Jill Sobule - Dottie's Charms (Deluxe Edition) (2019) Hi Res

A couple of years ago, Jill Sobule was given a vintage charm bracelet as a gift. When she examined the bracelet, she found it unexpectedly compelling. It wasn’t simply a funky piece of costume jewelry: it was instead an archive of events in a person’s life, memorialized by twenty-two tiny, cheap, pewter mementos. But whose life? All Sobule knew for sure about the original owner of the bracelet was the name etched in one of the charms: Dorothy.

Sobule soon saw in that charm bracelet the architecture for a musical project, which she set out to realize in an unusual and ambitious way: each of the charms would be the inspiration for a song, and the lyrics for each song would be written by a different writer. She contacted ten authors whom she had long admired: David Hajdu, Jonathan Lethem, Sam Lipsyte, James Marcus, Sara Marcus, Nina Mehta, Rick Moody, Mary Jo Salter, Luc Sante, and Vendela Vida. Every one signed on. The lyrics were written across more than a year’s time, and Sobule matched each set with suitably variegated music: wistful, tender, comic, dark. The result, Dottie’s Charms, is rich in the kind of storytelling energy and buoyant humor that has always been Jill Sobule’s signature.

The only thing missing from this cinematic enterprise was a visual element. And that too was eventually addressed, first by the illustrator and painter Molly Crabapple (who did all the graphics here as well as the CD and vinyl jacket), then by three gifted filmmakers: Bette Gordon, Tom Kalin, and Sara Zandieh. They have made Dottie’s Charms a treat for the eye as well as the ear.