Who’s on Susanna Hoffs’s List?
Susanna Hoffs, the songwriter, novelist, and singer in the Bangles, the nineteen-eighties all-female rock band, was sitting on the shady side of MOMA’s sculpture garden. She had often looked down on this very spot from the living room of Apartment 12-H in the Museum Tower, next door, which was her parents’ pied-à-terre for thirty years. “But I don’t think I’ve ever been here,” she said, glancing up at the twelfth floor. If you were watching MTV forty years ago, when the video of the Bangles’ hit “Walk Like an Egyptian” was playing on heavy rotation, you know that glance, intimately.
Hoffs, the daughter of a Freudian psychoanalyst, Joshua Hoffs, and a visual artist and filmmaker, Tamar Hoffs, lives in the same affluent West L.A. neighborhood where she grew up. But the Hoffs have roots in Brooklyn. Her grandfather Saul Hoffs delivered babies out of the family’s house in Flatbush. Joshua went to James Madison High School with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with whom he later corresponded. He went on to Harvard, where he studied with Anna Freud; in the Hoffs’s nonobservant Jewish household, Freud was God. After Joshua’s death, in 2024, the family sold the apartment.
“After he died, so many people, including famous people, told me, ‘Your dad helped me so much,’ ” Hoffs said, perched on a Bertoia chair, her feet barely touching the ground. “My dad was so nonjudgmental. He was, like, ‘People have feelings. People have impulses.’ ” She added, “He was also gorgeous. I’m sorry if that’s weird to say, but he was very handsome.”
Hoffs wore a blue-and-white-striped sailor T-shirt and dark pants. She started her life in the arts as a dancer, and she still moves like one. She was sitting not far from Picasso’s bronze goat, which, as a Capricorn, she related to, she said. She shares the goat’s steely resolve, which she relied on in writing her well-received 2023 music-industry novel, “This Bird Has Flown.”
Next week, Hoffs begins a residency at Café Carlyle, where she’ll perform songs from “The List,” her first album of new music in fourteen years, and some classics, such as “Manic Monday,” which Prince wrote but gave to Hoffs to record because he loved her voice, and also because he was taken with the French maid outfit she wore in the video for the Bangles’ “Hero Takes a Fall.” The band broke up in 1989, in part because the success of the song “Eternal Flame,” which Hoffs co-wrote with Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, made her bandmates feel sidelined. She performed the tune at Steinberg’s funeral, earlier this year. “That was really hard,” she said. It’s on the set list.
Hoffs has lent her jingle-jangle-morning voice, which remains unchanged, to such classics as “Cinnamon Girl” and “Sunday Morning” (also on the Carlyle set list) in three excellent cover albums with Matthew Sweet, and, more recently, to a winning rendition of the Mamas and the Papas song “Twelve Thirty,” with Sheryl Crow, Chris Stills, and Rufus Wainwright, who also appears on a track on “The List.”
Hoffs said that she was reminded of the list from which the new album takes its name last year, while she was working on songs in her living room with her songwriting partner and producer, C. J. Camerieri: “C.J. said, ‘You always have stories—just pull from those.’ ” Hoffs thought of a list she’d made years earlier, on a Filofax page—“that’s how long ago it was”—of all her boyfriends, starting with her sweetheart at U.C. Berkeley, where she was an art major, and ending with Jay Roach, the Hollywood director whom she married in 1993, and who is the subject of “None of Them Were You,” a song from the new album.
“You want to see the list?” Hoffs asked. “I think I have a screenshot of it.” She took out her iPhone and began scrolling.
It’s safe to say that, back in the Bangles’ heyday, the fantasy of being on Susanna Hoffs’s list burned bright in not a few of her fans, possibly including Prince himself.
“O.K., here it is,” she said. On her screen was a pencilled list of twenty or so names written in a neat cursive. “It’s not that long,” she said.
She went through the list. “O.K., some of these were jerks—like him,” she said, pointing to the name of an actor in an eighties action movie. “And this.” She pointed to the name of an actor who was on a lot of ladies’ lists back in the day. He made it?
She glanced up at Apartment 12-H again. Somewhere up there, the good doctor was smiling.
She said, “I mean, surely Taylor Swift has a better list.” ♦