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Forever Young

Cross-country moves, new projects and a ‘Real Housewives’ romance among DJ’s adventures

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Lesbian DJ Tracy Young spins at Cobalt Friday. (Photo courtesy of Grubman PR)

Editor’s note: ‘Tonight’ in this story refers to Friday, Feb. 4, the Blade’s street publication date.

Tracy Young at Cobalt
Tonight (Friday)
10 p.m. to 3 a.m.
Cover: $8
1639 R St., N.W.

The last time we spoke to DJ Tracy Young, she was sitting in a cafe in Miami. Today, she’s in her apartment in Chelsea, N.Y., with a sore throat, dreading the upcoming storm that’s supposed to drop 20 more inches of snow.

Her dog Rocco fights for her attention during a phone interview.

“I want to go back to Miami,” she says, laughing.

She’s not moving to the Sunshine State just yet. Tonight she’s returning to D.C. and will spin at Cobalt (1639 R St., N.W.), one of the first places she worked as a DJ.

Young is originally from the D.C. area. She graduated from T.C. Williams High School and then University of Maryland in 1998 with a degree in communications. Her first DJ gig was for a hip-hop radio station in D.C., WPGC.

It’s been at least 15 years since Young last played the club.

“And I cannot wait,” she says, adding that it’s crazy how long it’s been.

“I was visiting Fort Lauderdale along with my boyfriend Stephen and I picked up a gay rag and there was a huge spread on Tracy,” says Mark Rutstein, manager of Cobalt, on how the event came to be. “I somehow forgot about her since she hasn’t performed in D.C. in years.”

The last time Young was in the area was two years ago when she performed at Town, a larger venue than Cobalt. She says you reach a different audience at smaller venues than you do the large ones.

“Young is a legend in the dance community,” Rutstein says.  “Cobalt doesn’t get a chance to bring in talent like Tracy very often because of our size restrictions.”

Level One will be open so there will be three floors tonight, all with Young’s music being piped through the speakers. Cobalt will have its usual free vodka drinks from 11 p.m. to midnight and Rutstein suggests people get there before 11 to avoid the line.

It’s been a strange couple of years for Young.

She’s made two cross-country moves.

After living in Miami for a while, she and her then-partner moved to Los Angeles. That relationship ended and Young didn’t want to be there anymore, so she moved to New York. Luckily, Young likes to travel.

“I get tired of it, but I feel like a loser when I don’t,” she says. “It’s nice to go to places I haven’t been before.”

She’s also been the topic of tabloids and celebrity gossip.

“I don’t know why that became such a big deal,” Young says about her relationship with “Real Housewives of Atlanta” star Kim Zolciak.

The pair was rumored to be having a relationship after Young worked with the Housewife on her song, “Tardy for the Party.” Two years ago, Young did not want to talk about the relationship, but now she’s more than willing to talk about most aspects, except how it ended, only saying it didn’t end on a good note.

Young says Zolciak was the one who leaked their relationship to the papers and called her a liar.

“Being gay is hard enough,” she says, adding that Zolciak had the additional pressures of having children and being in the spotlight because of “Real Housewives.”

Young had just broken up with someone whom she had really cared for and, while she says they had something real at the time, she thinks Zolciak was a distraction.

“For lack of a better term, a rebound,” she says. “I don’t regret it. She did put a smile on my face.”

Young has since moved on, saying her life has calmed down quite a bit and she’s just focusing on music right now.

“I do wish her the best,” she says. “I don’t dislike her … I just want different things out of life.”

Young has several projects in the works, including an original album, which she hopes to have for release in the fall.

“When you have an original production, you can be a little more creative,” Young says, since with remixes — from which she gained fame — a lot of things are already set such as the vocals.

There are a lot of people she wants to work with on her album and they span different genres.

“I kind of go all over the board,” she says, after listing Sarah McLachlan, Macy Gray, Nicki Minaj and Eminem as performers she’d like to work with on this project. “Eminem is a genius.”

Young wants to combine dance and hip-hop. She’s still creating remixes, including one she just completed of Britney Spears’ new song, “Hold It Against Me.” One song Young thinks is great and would love to remix is Pink’s newest single, “Fuckin’ Perfect.”

“I love working with female artists,” she says. She gravitates toward them more because of how the vocals sound and work on the dance floor.

How does Young feel about being able to work with such big names like Spears and Madonna?

“It’s such a crazy honor,” she says. “I think I’m very lucky.”

Young won’t come right out and say it’s her talent that has gotten her as far as she has, but a combination of talent, luck, hard work and being in the right place at the right time. Visitors to her website, tracyyoung.com, can listen to weekly podcasts she puts together, which can also be found on iTunes.  Fans can also follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/djtracyyoung.

Young has even started a weekly radio show on Thursday on Sirius’s Electric Area. The show airs from midnight to 3 a.m. But that’s still not it for the DJ. She’s also working on a book and is gathering information for it now.

“I love reading autobiographies,” Young says, listing Ozzy Osbourne and Keith Richards as recent reads.

“One thing I regret is not journaling over my career,” she says.  “All these things happened and I just didn’t document it.”

Young does have all the press clippings from throughout her career.

“My life has been crazy,” she says. “Nothing is normal in my life.”

When anything exciting happens now, she journals it. She doesn’t know if she’ll release the book or if it’ll be something she does just for herself, but one thing is certain.

“I’ve grown a lot from gathering this information,” she says.  “It’s healing.”

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Music & Concerts

Underdog glorious: a personal remembrance of Jill Sobule

Talented singer, songwriter died in house fire on May 1

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Writer Gregg Shapiro with Jill Sobule in 2000. (Photo courtesy Shapiro)

I’ve always prided myself on being the kind of music consumer who purchased music on impulse. When I stumbled across “Things Here Are Different,” Jill Sobule’s 1990 MCA Records debut album on vinyl in a favorite Chicago record store, I bought it without knowing anything about her. This was at a time when we didn’t have our phones in our pockets to search for information about the artist on the internet. The LP stayed in my collection until, as vinyl was falling out of fashion, I replaced it with a CD a few years later.

Early in my career as an entertainment journalist, I received a promo copy of Jill’s eponymous 1995 Atlantic Records album. That year, Atlantic Records was one of the labels at the forefront of signing and heavily promoting queer artists, including Melissa Ferrick and Extra Fancy, and its roster included the self-titled album by Jill. It was a smart move, as the single “I Kissed A Girl” became a hit on radio and its accompanying video (featuring Fabio!) was in heavy rotation on MTV (when they still played videos).

Unfortunately for Jill, she was a victim of record label missteps. When 1997’s wonderful “Happy Town” failed to repeat the success, Atlantic dumped her. That was Atlantic’s loss, because her next album, the superb “Pink Pearl” contained “Heroes” and “Mexican Wrestler,” two of her most beloved songs. Sadly, Beyond Music, the label that released that album ceased to exist after just a few years. To her credit, the savvy Jill had also started independently releasing music (2004’s “The Folk Years”). That was a smart move because her next major-label release, the brilliant “Underdog Victorious” on Artemis Records, met a similar fate when that label folded.

With her 2009 album “California Years,” Jill launched her own indie label, Pinko Records, on which she would release two more outstanding full-length discs, 2014’s “Dottie’s Charms” (on which she collaborated with some of her favorite writers, including David Hadju, Rick Moody, Mary Jo Salter, and Jonathan Lethem), and 2018’s stunning “Nostalgia Kills.” Jill’s cover of the late Warren Zevon’s “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” on “Nostalgia Kills” was particularly poignant as she had toured with him as an opening act.

Jill was a road warrior, constantly on tour, and her live shows were something to behold. My first interview with Jill took place at the Double Door in Chicago in early August of 1995, when she was the opening act for legendary punk band X. She had thrown her back out the previous day and was diagnosed with a herniated disc. To be comfortable, she was lying down on a fabulous-‘50s sofa. “I feel like I’m at my shrink’s,” she said to me, “Do you want me to talk about my mother?”

That sense of humor, which permeated and enriched her music, was one of many reasons to love Jill. I was privileged to interview her for seven of her albums. Everything you would want to know about her was right there in her honest lyrics, in which she balanced her distinctive brand of humor with serious subject matter. Drawing on her life experiences in songs such as “Bitter,” “Underachiever,” “One of These Days,” “Freshman,” “Jetpack,” “Nothing To Prove,” “Forbidden Thoughts of Youth,” “Island of Lost Things,” “Where Do I Begin,” “Almost Great,” and “Big Shoes,” made her songs as personal as they were universal, elicited genuine affection and concern from her devoted fans.

While she was a consummate songwriter, Jill also felt equally comfortable covering songs made famous by others, including “Just A Little Lovin’” (on the 2000 Dusty Springfield tribute album “Forever Dusty”) and “Stoned Soul Picnic” (from the 1997 Laura Nyro tribute album “Time and Love”). Jill also didn’t shy away from political subject matter in her music with “Resistance Song,” “Soldiers of Christ,” “Attic,” “Heroes,” “Under the Disco Ball,” and the incredible “America Back” as prime examples.

Here’s something else worth mentioning about Jill. She was known for collaboration skills. As a songwriter, she maintained a multi-year creative partnership with Robin Eaton (“I Kissed A Girl” and many others), as well as Richard Barone, the gay frontman of the renowned band The Bongos. Jill’s history with Barone includes performing together at a queer Octoberfest event in Chicago in 1996. Writer and comedian Julie Sweeney, of “SNL” and “Work in Progress” fame was another Chicago collaborator with Sobule (Sweeney lives in a Chicago suburb), where they frequently performed their delightful “The Jill and Julia Show.” John Doe, of the aforementioned band X, also collaborated with Jill in the studio (“Tomorrow Is Breaking” from “Nostalgia Kills”), as well as in live performances.

On a very personal note, in 2019, when I was in the process of arranging a reading at the fabulous NYC gay bookstore Bureau of General Services – Queer Division, I reached out to Jill and asked her if she would like to be on the bill with me. We alternated performing; I would read a couple of poems, and Jill would sing a couple of songs. She even set one of my poems to music, on the spot.

Jill had an abundance of talent, and when she turned her attention to musical theater, it paid off in a big way. Her stage musical “F*ck 7th Grade,” a theatrical piece that seemed like the next logical step in her career, had its premiere at Pittsburgh’s City Theatre in the fall of 2020, during the height of the pandemic. The unique staging (an outdoor drive-in stage at which audience members watched from their cars) was truly inspired. “F*ck 7th Grade” went on to become a New York Times Critic’s pick, as well as earning a Drama Desk nomination.

In honor of the 30th anniversary of Jill’s eponymous 1995 album, reissue label Rhino Records is re-releasing it on red vinyl. Jill and I had been emailing each other to arrange a time for an interview. We even had a date on the books for the third week of May.

When she died in a house fire in Minnesota on May 1 at age 66, Jill received mentions on network and cable news shows. She was showered with attention from major news outlets, including obits in the New York Times and Rolling Stone (but not Pitchfork, who couldn’t be bothered to review her music when she was alive). Is it wrong to think that if she’d gotten this much attention when she was alive she could have been as big as Taylor Swift? I don’t think so.

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Music & Concerts

Tom Goss returns with ‘Bear Friends Furever Tour’

Out singer/songwriter to perform at Red Bear Brewing Co.

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Singer Tom Goss is back. (Photo by Dusti Cunningham)

Singer Tom Goss will bring his “Bear Friends Furever Tour” to D.C. on Sunday, June 8 at 8 p.m. at Red Bear Brewing Co. 

Among the songs he will perform will be “Bear Soup,” the fourth installment in his beloved bear song anthology series. Following fan favorites like “Bears,” “Round in All the Right Places,” and “Nerdy Bear,” this high-energy, bass-thumping banger celebrates body positivity, joyful indulgence, and the vibrant spirit of the bear subculture.

For more details, visit Tom Goss’s website.

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Music & Concerts

Kylie brings ‘Tension’ tour to D.C.

Performance on Tuesday at Capital One Arena

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Kylie Minogue visits D.C. on Tuesday.

Aussie pop icon Kylie Minogue brings her acclaimed “Tension” world tour to D.C. next Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Capital One Arena. Tickets are still available at Ticketmaster.

The show features songs spanning her long career, from 1987 debut single, “The Loco-Motion,” to “Padam, Padam” from her album, “Tension.”

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