Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin RichmondAs a founding member of the iconic all-girl band The Bangles, Susanna Hoffs is perhaps most associated with 80s hits like “Manic Monday,” “Eternal Flame,” and “Walk Like An Egyptian.” After releasing three platinum-selling albums, in 1989 The Bangles broke up. Two years later, Susanna started to release solo material before reuniting with The Bangles at the end of the 90s.
Over the years Susanna has continued to release music and act in movies. She even appeared in all three Austin Powers films as part of a fictional Mod band.
This year Susanna has added another creative pursuit to her repertoire—she’s now a published novelist. Her first book, This Bird Has Flown, was released in April. And she put out her latest collection of cover songs on the album The Deep End produced by the great Peter Asher.
On today’s episode Justin Richmond talks to Susanna Hoffs about how Bruce Springsteen helped The Bangles secure a record deal after seeing them play at an amusement park in Southern California. She also tells the story of first listening to Prince’s demo of “Manic Monday.”
You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite Susanna Hoffs songs HERE.
Pushkin. As a founding member of the iconic all girl band The Bengals, Susannah Hoffs is perhaps most closely associated with hits like Manic Monday, Eternal Flame, and Walk Like an Egyptian. After releasing three platinum selling albums, the Bengals broke up in eighty nine. Two years later, Susannah started to put out interesting solo material before reuniting with the Bengals at the end of the nineties. Over the years, Susanna's continued to release music and even act in movies, including appearances in all three Austin Powers films as part of a fictional mod band. This year, Susanna's added another creative pursuit to her repertoire. She's now a published novelist. Her first book, This Bird Has Flown, was released in April. The same month, she put out a new collection of cover songs called The Deep End, produced by the Great Peter Asher. On today's episode, I talked to Susannah Hoffs about how Bruce Springsteen helps the Bengals secure a record deal after seeing them play at an amusement park just outside of la She also tells the story of first listening to Princess demo of Manic Monday. This is broken record liner notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Mitchman. Here's my interview with Susannah Hoffs from her home in La. How long you've been living here?
About?
Oh my god, this is really going to age me. But I'm all into being honest about my age.
I'm sixty four.
Don't even look close to your age? Really, I look older than you can.
No, you don't.
I look much older than you. No.
For some reason, sixty four really like has a special like. I even got weird al who I love Yankovic made me a special birthday message that it was more than the usual one, that he's such a kind and wonderful and talented guy.
But this year I got the one.
I'm sixty four, full monty, full glorious birthday message.
Anyway. How long have I been living here? About? Twenty years?
Twenty years?
Yeah, And the acoustics in this room have been very friendly to music making and having little music parties.
And how often are you playing music in here?
Pretty frequently, but we have had a few iconic music parties. We had members of Crowded House and Colin Hay was here playing. We had a big we celebrated one of my birthdays and it turned into this crazy music night. Lindsay Buckingham has played in here, yep, taking requests.
No one else is playing right, because how do you play well along with Lindsay.
Lindsay was playing and he was just and I was sitting in that little child's.
Chair right there by the piano and looking up.
At him as he played. Anything I asked for he did. It was incredible. Wow, yeah, he was so what did you ask for? I asked for secondhand news? I asked for go your own way, I think. And then he and Ben Harper started singing on together on a song that I'm now forgetting, one of the great songs that he'd written. Ben Harper was here too, and it was amazing.
Wow. Yeah, we were talking just before the mic started rolling about your book that you put out. Yes, spurt his phone, Yes, really.
Good, thank you.
I guess it goes back to being a kid and a teenager, and I think it's a coping strategy to want to.
Disappear into a fiction of some form.
I've always loved going to movies, watching movies, reading books, and I think, you know, there's stories inside of songs too, And I don't know why, but I just like to kind of fill my days finding inspiration through those stories. And again there is a bit of an escape bist coping mechanism aspect to it, of not wanting to kind of sit with my own my own worries or fears, and.
I like to just drift away into a story.
This is your first book, thought me, So would you write for fun before? Like, have you ever written anything?
I started, I started a novel and I just double checked in a drawer. It was written in like sort of small spiral notebooks back and the date on it is nineteen eighty nine.
So it was right when the.
Bengals journey, which was most of the eighties from me going around of trying to find bandmates and advertising myself in throwaway papers and the eventually meeting Vicky and Debbie and then the band formed from there. But I had always had a dream of writing a novel, and I just kept putting it aside. But towards the end of the eighties, when I felt the Bengals sort of decade was kind of winding down and we were all kind of antsy to do other things, I started a novel. Now I just it's up there, but I don't.
Know if is it good.
I don't know because I'd been so immersed in the journey of writing this bird has flown, which took several years.
It takes years to write a novel.
And because I never it was always either too lazy or too impatient to ever take classes. In fact, I don't even know how to read a musical chart. I can be handed one and be doing like a choral part with friends at like Largo, for example, I performed with Amy Mann a lot of times, and sometimes we would do like holiday shows, and I'd have to I'd be handed a chart and I'd pretend to pretend to read it.
I just kind of look at the shapes. Oh the note went up there.
But no.
I same with pretty much everything I've done in the arts. I kind of just threw myself in.
Which is interesting because you like you come from I mean, both your parents are college educated. Yeah, we went to the same school. We went to Berkeley.
Yeah, we both went to Berkeley. My parents met at Yale. My dad had gone to Yeah. I know, I came from a very intellectual family, and yet I just I think it's my impatience and my like a strong urge to just dive in.
On average, how long will a writing session last for you? Short spurts or long long.
Spurts like I'll have to set aside because I've been doing a lot of promotion for the novel and also for the new album. You know, in my days have not sort of you know, opened up for me to sort of go, okay, I just did you know, spent four hours doing this other stuff, And it's kind of a different kind of use of your brain. I think with the the flow state is where you want to be, like when your just fingers are going and you're seeing it somehow in your mind's eye, I guess, and you just go and you and the characters delight me. They they I don't know where their voices come from, obviously in my head and obviously I'm generating them. But sometimes it actually doesn't feel like that, I guess.
Like the way some songwriters say it feels like, you know, like Paul McCartney and Yesterday, it's like, oh, the song must have the song must exist somewhere else. You know, it seems like he still can't.
Believe, so he doesn't even know how it just came to him.
The story of yesterday, as I understand it is he woke up from a dream with that song, with that melody in his head, and he was he wrote to it, but he was positive it was like scrambled eggs.
Did he have another name for it.
Which was yeah, one of those was maybe it was maybe.
That was I think it was scrambled eggs until he did did hone hone the lyrics?
The lyrics. I think he didn't believe it was actually like his melody. Like he he was like, there must be an old something I remember from something someone.
Oh my god, that's fascinating. Yeah, you don't know where these creative sparks.
Come from or how. Yeah, it's a mystery to me too. It's weird. It's like hearing voices though in your head. It's a little bit.
Strange, which I mean, I imagine the main character Jane came to you first.
Yeah, I mean I kind of grappled initially we should she be an actress? Should she be someone in Hollywood? A sense that she should be a creative person and a performer of some sort. But then I thought, you know, oh, but I know what it's like.
To be a musician. I know all the different aspects of that. You know what it.
Feels like to step out onto a stage and have horrible stage fright and to feel like your heart is being so loudly. You know the audience can hear it too, Because that happens to me.
I have to kind of.
I have different ways that I cope with stage fright, and one of them is which I didn't give to Jane because there wasn't.
Time in this.
You know, you need predicament in a story. Yeah, so she didn't have time to do the ritual that I do, which is to listen to something like soul Finger by the Barcas or something like that.
Something I can dance dance to.
I used to listen to Let's Let's Go Crazy Press, but before walking onto a stage, Like, there is no way I could be like me, neurotic human worrying about this, that and the other. Will the monitors work, will my guitar work? Will I be able to hear myself? All the different things that go into performing live.
So I just have to like dance it out, man.
I mean is that the Bengals days when you would listen to let's go crazy, I.
Would listen to When did I start doing it?
I think it was probably after that because I used to use white wine as my let's go crazy. I would always have a little bit of a few SIPs at least or maybe maybe half of a one of those like plastic cups that you get backstage.
Oh like just like the solo cup.
I have a solo cup.
The memories are resurfacing now and I'd be like, someone would try to talk to me, and I'd like, I can't talk to you now. I'm working on down in like a quarter of this so that I can have some liquid courage to step out onto a stage. And I write about this in the book and become her or someone who could walk out onto a stage and strap on her guitar and I don't know, bring it, bring it and hope that the voice is working and everything else.
I don't know.
The writing the book actually made me think about what that experience was in a deeper way than I kind of ever had.
One of the cool things about the character I think is it's not like a character. It's not an artist who's at there, you know, creative and commercial peak. It's like someone who sort of has had that is, you know, kind of lost their way a bit totally.
I mean more than that, like everything in her life that could go wrong has gone wrong. Yeah, dumped and cheated on by the boyfriend, the long term boyfriend, the producer.
Yeah, you know, being thirty three, that.
Alone, Like I remember, it seemed like right now, is that what you are?
Yes, it's going to be okay.
What you said, it's.
Going to be okay. I can attest to it. At sixty four, things are really good. So it's all a mindset. But for I don't know, it seemed to be a thing that there's kind of a peak time for I don't know people in the music business certainly and maybe even in the movie business that they're being young and in your twenties even or even like it is a prime real estate or chance to be you know, if all goes well, you know, you're you're, people will know about you, you'll be able to do good work, whether it's in a movie or in recording industry.
It was the book in a way, a way to sort of offset some level of yeah, you know, just malaise in your own Yeah, it wasn't malaise.
It was like, how do I stay creative because all I want to do the juices are flowing, but like where to put them?
Another screenplay? Try again? You know?
In that and it was it was how I fell so deeply in love with the process that like Jay would come home and go, wait, you're still sitting there at the kitchen table when I used to write at the kitchen table, and I'd be like, yeah, and I'm right in it, like ensconced in this moment, and I found it just blissful, yea, even though it's hard.
Did you write the album your new album at the same.
Time, Well, I didn't write it, mostly because I was still very much engaged with the writing of the book book and when Little Brown bought the book, and then you go through a period of revisions. I met up with Peter Asher during right in the mix of Peter.
I did it with the.
Great Peter Asher, who you know was the first president of Apple Records and produced James Taylor and Linda Ronstett records that literally changed my life. And I taught myself to sing. Just like with the book writing, I didn't study. I just studied by mimicking albums. So whether it was a Joni Jony albums or Linda albums, you know, and the Peter Asher were so great.
Yeah.
So Peter randomly reached out at a very dark place during the pandemic when we were all really stuck at home, but we were starting to be able.
To go out.
We'd been vaccinated, you know, things were looking brighter. And I started to go to Malibu twice a week and we would just sit around with guitars and just sing like campfire style. Yeah, and then we realized there was a handful of songs that because I was so engrossed in doing revisions still on the book, it was fun to just cover songs. And then it went from sitting in his living room with guitars and singing to the idea to call Elvis Costello and on the EP that's not out yet, Wed, we recorded so much music that we made an album. It was like we could have been a double album we were considering, which would be very old school, like very seventies, but we ended up putting out the album and then we have sort of an EP. But Elvis Costello I wanted to I always wanted to do the Keith Richards high harmony on Connection there the rolling Stone song, so we sing that together and I'm Keith and Elvis's mixed. So yeah, that album has a ever so slightly leaning towards country and western sort of material. But again, I was still working with my publishers and doing final revisions during that time and h and at the same time driving out to Malibu to this beautiful studio and hanging out with Russ Kunkle and Leland Sklarr and Waddi walk Tell and Danny Korchmar during the pandemic incredible.
I mean those are like that, I know, those are the guys.
They're amazing and they're wonderful human beings, and I just I was really kind of like pinching myself the whole time, like feeling such gratitude.
You mentioned in the session players your minded me believe it's on your first record. You had John Entwhistle, I know, play bass.
I know my first solo record. Yeah, and Mick Fleetwood I think played on something too.
John hem Whistle's bass plane is that's amazing. Guy's incredible, I know. Back to the new record, Yeah, a surprise under my film was there to lead things off. Yeah, what are your feelings on the original.
Okay, well I love it.
I love it, and I love the Stone And because I was in the Bengals, and because the Bengals Beatles there was always like a connection for us, because it was the glue that cemented us. Was like being little girls growing up and when the British invasion happened and the Beatles were everything.
You know, the song about Liverpool on the first d Yeah.
So it was so part of like the bengalsgeist. But I love the Stones, and in the Stones I came to know and love more like in college and during the eighties when because I had been so engrossed with the Beatles music and they were so supreme to me.
As you know, they just they affected.
My life so deeply and it kind of got the ball rolling on my career and or I call it a career, my journey as a musician and lover of music above and beyond anything. But yeah, I was just one day listening to the Stones on my morning walk. And I'm one of those people who, you know how some people say I always listened to the lyrics first, or I always dial in on the music first. I always considered myself someone who was like more more sort of entranced by the music, and sometimes I would tune out, like really focusing in on what are they saying here?
And that was the case for me.
Weird that I went on to write a novel, but given that, so I just was listening to it.
And I went, wait a minute, Wait a.
Minute, this is very retro and I thought, wow, like, how fun it would be to turn the tables.
My thin defense of it has always been it's thin. I recognize it, but I've always told they need defend because I just love the song. It's one of the great songs. Is it's It's under my thumb the girl who who once had me down? Yeah, And so it's like it was it was role reversed. It was it wasn't that like men need to put their thumb on women or that make even necessarily in every relationshipiel he's making.
It's his personal story.
Yet men thumb And so now I got Now.
So he's just saying his truth there, like he's just expressing his emotion.
Yeah, So I just thought much.
I just was thinking, like, you know, in feminist terms, that it would be fun to turn the tables on that. And and and actually there's there's a lot of sexuality in that song. I mean, there's sexuality in rock and roll. It is. It is why we love it. You know, it's intrinsic to the to the genre.
You know.
So I think it's so. I thought I just it was.
It's all music, really, it's everything gospel, you know, in an unspoken sort of way.
I agree.
Yeah, God, we could go on a deep, deep dive on that we wanted to.
We have to take a quick break and then we'll come back with more of my interview with Susannah Hoffs. We're back with more from Susannah Hafs. When you recorded the Bengals, what was that experience?
Like the EP that was a little more that was pre getting signed to Sony. So that was with an amazing producer, Craig Leon. He was wonderful to work with.
Yes, yes, he suicide.
Yeah, he did the Ramones and also did he work with the Go Gos? I don't think so, but the Ramones for sure.
Blondie, Yeah, Blondie so cool.
Yeah, So Blondie and the Ramones were the notable bands that he had worked with that you know, we were like, okay, yes, please please produce EP.
How did you How did you get connected with him?
Then our managers maybe we were at that point with Miles Copeland, who managed the Police, and so it's possible that Miles it must have been somehow connected to through that.
How did you get the Columbia contract?
Well, it was the only record company who was interested in us, and Peter Philb in the A and our guy brought Bruce Springsteen to see us play at Magic Mountain. So Peter Philbin was the only music and our guy that seemed to have taken an interest in the Bengals, even though we had a kind of we were a popular local club band in Los Angeles and we're playing, you know, tons of gigs at the Whiskey of Go Go, and and at a.
Time when the LA scene, the club scene was.
It was happening, New wave was happening, punk rock was happening. There was kind of a we were somewhere in the middle between new wave and punk rock, and we were something that was more like now deemed Paisley Underground, which was we were a band in the eighties who were obsessed with music from the sixties and trying to drag those sounds and the twelve string guitar, electric guitar, like the Birds and stuff like that into our sound. It was like the Birds on guitars meets the Mamas and Papas, So the Mamas and the Mamas we would have been, you know. Yeah, So at that time we were we were really part of a very vibrant scene in LA that wasn't punk but had punk.
Leanings and were scrappy. We weren't polished.
We were thrift store wearing girls who were mostly self taught.
You know.
There was no sort of American idol sort of like world at that point, and we wouldn't have wanted that anyway. We were really we were really a garage band. But anyway, it was basically kind of crickets from the record industry. Nobody was like, we weren't on anyone's radar until was it discouraging?
Not really.
I mean we were young and kind of brash, thinking like we weren't kind of in some ways we weren't focused. I wasn't focused on that. I wasn't like the focus was not and I think this is true for the whole band. The focus was not we got to become pop stars. The focus was, you know, we want to connect with an audience and we want to be ourselves, you know, And I think that was a good thing about the band.
We weren't. There wasn't this Fengali.
Who lined up a couple, you know, different people based on how they looked and then put them in with songwriters or anything like that. We were definitely a grassroots garage band. And interestingly, at the time that Miles Copeland took us on as management clients, he was also putting together a version of that other kind of band with Darryl Hannah was in it.
Yeah.
It was like all really beautiful sort of models and actresses that he found and made a girl.
Called what was it called? Oh gosh, I.
Could try to find out the name of it, the band that it was. I think I want to say American Girls, which sounds like the name of those dolls.
Yeah. I want to get back to the Columbia stuff. But to your point of like nose Golly putting you together. It's interesting too, though that you had Michael Steele in the group, the bass player, the bass player from the Runaways, which kind of was even though they were also kind of put together in right.
Yeah, So Kim Fallely called me when I was living in the garage of my parents' home in West la and and I just like I had such radar, you know, I knew who he was and I was like, no, thanks, you know.
It was just before the Bengals.
Yeah, it was like in the early days of the Bengals. Michael didn't join until there was a bass player in net Zelenskis, who was in the band in those early days. But right before, around the time, she wanted to leave to do more country and Western music and wasn't feeling comfortable in the band. And fair enough, I love Annette, we're really dear friends to this day, but she wanted she just wanted to move on. And that's when there was this opportunity for Michael Steele, who had been in the Runaways to and she was a very very accomplished bass player. She loved playing bass. She has a gorgeous voice, so really closing a great songwriter. She was extraordinarily and is extraordinarily talented. So when she joined the band, everything kind of fell into place. And it was around then that Columbia sort of went and it was just Peter Philben and he took Bruce Springsteen to see us at Magic Mountain in Valencia, and all I know is that Bruce must have liked us enough and said something and vetted us in some way. And I finally had a chance to thank him for that when he was at the What's the Grammy Salute to the Grammy Salute? Yeah, music care is Grammy Salute? And Jud Apatow, who loves Bruce Springsteen and John Stewart, was the host that night. Jay and I got a seat at Jud's table, yet he had never met Bruce, and I said, well, I'll be brazen and just drag you over there and reintroduce myself to him, which I did, And I have really cool picture where it's mostly that you see Bruce's wife, Patty talking to Tom Hanks's wife Rita. Yeah, and in the background, I'm smiling and I see and it's a profile of Jud and Bruce smiling.
At each other.
I'll show you.
Yeah. I have not seen Bruce since that.
No, since the Magic Mountain.
Yeah, no, I mean yeah, it was it.
Like medium then, like oh.
It was cool.
I mean we were so we didn't know he was coming to see us, so we were just like, what's happening, you know? But I don't think that Bruce thinks of it this way or even particularly remembers seeing us at Magic Mountain, But I always put it together that the one label that wanted us, which was Columbia, or that were intrigued with us and made that trap all the way from you know, Century City to Valencia, which is a bit of a commitment, and also had the thought to.
Bring Bruce Springsteene.
Yes, like, here's this grungey little garage band, all girl band.
But all I know is.
That they made that offer shortly after that, So something he did must have been said.
He must have liked us enough.
Now, how quickly did you start to make your first record? Oh?
Well, let's see. David Kahn was our producer, and we went through a whole I don't remember now, it's a long time ago, but I remember that we just did a pretty deep dive into like an extension of what our rehearsals would have been. But with David there to kind of think in terms of the record, we rehearsed and we played a lot of stuff not in the studio, yes, songs, songs we'd written. We showed him everything we had and we just kind of went from there. We were a band that were figured out our sound in part, in large part by covering songs that we like. That's how we figured out how to be bangles, you know. Like, so we would cover a lot of songs and they were almost always kind of cool, obscure nineteen sixties songs.
Stuff didn't even make records.
Yeah, yeah, like Pushing Do Hard by the Seeds, Debbie saying that one there was a song called Kicks by Paul Revere and the Raiders. We liked Paul Revere and the Raiders songs. I think we might have done two of their songs. We did where Were You When I Needed You? Which was the grassroots. I sang that one, which is like very jangly twelve string.
Looking back on that first record, what is your feeling towards it?
I think good, you know, I'd like probably a lot of people you talked to who've made records, and like, many decades have passed. I haven't revisited it in a long time, but I do remember we've recorded a lot of it up at place called Skylight, I think in Panga, So that was cool, and there was different Hollywood studios that we worked in. I just remember that I learned a lot from David Kahn. He was really obsessed with arrangement. And I feel happy that Prince discovered us through Hero Takes a Fall, which was a song that Vicky and I, who were really kind of a writing team within the band, came up with in the garage where I was living. It was that early on before we could kind of like afford to move out of, in my case, my parents' house.
You know, I was still living at home.
So we're to think now when I think back on it, because then I suddenly had this like job that was a real job, and then I was on a label, and you know, I had commitments and responsibilities. I wasn't just a kid post college living in my parents' garage, although I did live there for a big, big, big chunk the majority of the Bengals thing, I was living in a garage. Really yeah, just because once it took off and we were traveling all over the place, I mean, no one thought to buy houses until way later in the process. We there was like a year where we all were like, wait a minute. It really took us a long time. It was towards the tail end of the decade of the eighties where we sort of actually were like, there was the year that everybody bought a car, so we weren't used driving a car that our parents had happened. You know, I bought a white BMW.
Three twenty five.
It was snazzy, get on a car phone, hardwired into it with a curly chord.
You know, there was that eighty seven.
Amazing they had the car, I had a car phone. I remember being mesmerized by those as a kid.
When I said, yeah, I know, they were like, whoa, They're like from the future.
Yeah, isn't it like ancient history?
That record was so cool because it sounds like you guys really figured out who you were from the EP to the first kind of full length. Yeah, it seems like you and VICKI kind of figured out your song.
Yeah, sort of for sure.
Rhythm, yes, guys. Yeah. How did it feel when the next record came out and it was such a big because it's all these steps. It's like you do the EP and you sign and you do this big record. Then it's like the next record is like huge.
Yeah, that was crazy.
So there was a big leap somehow from the studio we were working in Tapanga for that first album all over the place, and then we went to Sunset Sound Factory, which is the smaller of the two Sunset Sounds that are sister studios, and that's where we started to work on Different Light with David Kahn again. That record ended up having some radio hits, including Manic Monday. So Prince had really he really liked our video of Hero Takes a Fall, which was that song that Vicky and I wrote in the garage on the prompting of David Kahn to write something that wasn't like a cowby, like a that kind of beat and more like a four on the floor beat. So when we were writing Hero Takes a Fall, we were kind of playing drums on our thighs, you know, like holding the beat that way and kind of getting the rhythm. And so a lot of things opened up from that first album and then Prince saw somehow. Prince had this idea that I should come over and get this cassette from him at Sunset Sound, the big mother ship studio on Sunset, and he had a song to share with us, and it was Manic Monday. So during that recording of Different Light at Sunset Sound Factory, I came back with the cassette from Prince and we recorded that.
Song and he had offered me yeah, oh yeah yeah, and I have the cassette upstairs. Wow, yeah, I can show you if you want. Yeah yeah.
So we just kind of hovered around a cassette player and I was immediately like, oh my god, this would be great to sing. And so then we recorded it and at Sunset Sound Factory and it came out really well, and then it became the first single on that record and it became a hit, our first like top forty radio hit.
How was it having a hit?
It was nuts.
We were on tour Columbia had released it as the first single off the Different Light record, and we were just standing on a corner and somebody pulled up in a convertible and something sounded familiar, but not familiar, because if it was the Beatles song playing on the radio, I would have been like, oh it took We all had this weird delayed reaction of like, oh shit, that's our song, that's Manic Monday. Like there was this weird, like I don't know, delay in connecting the dots, and then we were like off to the races at that point that this song just started to go up the charts and it got to number two, which was pretty good because Prince was I think Kiss.
Was number one, and We and Manic Monday was number.
Two and Prince. It offered you other songs.
He there was another song listed on the cassette called Jealous Girl. I bet you that demo's floating around. But the weird thing is, I wanted to digitize that cassette and I took it to a friend's studio and we went through the whole cassette and Jealous Girl did not play. So I don't know if it just like the ravages of like a cassette sitting in a box for thirty years, is to blame or not. I don't know. It was just never but I think it's probably in his archive. I think we could google it and we could maybe find it pull it up.
Yeah, we're going to pause for a quick break and then come back with more from my interview with Susannah Hoffs. We're back with the rest of our conversation with Susannah Hoffs. Did you know that Walk Like Egyptian was going to be the hit that it was? No, that is the most bizarre, you know, it's like it's a great song, but it's it's so out of left field. I know.
I think that's the brilliance of it. So I was at David's office, David Kahn up at Columbia, and he wanted to play me some songs there, just share some things that had crossed his desk, and one of them was Marnie Dixon. I want to say, oh god, I'm going to get it wrong. I'll try to find out there was a woman who had covered it, and also Charlie Sexton had covered it, of all things. So I recently was able to talk to him about that, but.
He released it.
I think so.
I think if you google you'll find other versions. These other versions are probably somewhere. But David played it for me, and I just thought it had this really again nineteen sixties bossa Nova like there was something about it. The rhythm of it was so interesting, the shaker being so predominant, and the kind of I don't know, it sounded like something from a movie or something like or from another time. So we just we all were kind of curious to try it out because sometimes when you're in the studio, you record more than you think you record more than you think you're gonna need, and then you pick the best or the most catchy or connect with people the most, so you just never know. There's a lot of lore within the band because you know, different people in the band were singing different parts, you know, and not everybody got to sing a part, you know. W I know always felt kind of left out, and I totally I can really empathize with that. But we had no idea that that song would catch on the way it did. It was the third single, If She Knew What She Wants, a Jewells share song that I sang was a second single, and it did moderately well, and it was very bangles. It was lush harmon these all the way through. It was a beautiful song.
Oh thank you.
That was kind of let it go was like a chance for all of us to feel in because we wrote it together as a foursome and we sang it together as a foursome. So we kind of needed that as it was one of the last songs we recorded on that album. Yeah, it was kind of like the band needed that. Yeah, it was like a really bonding yeah, you know what. I loved that one, and we all wrote it I think, yeah, together.
I guess I want to jump to the next record, because you know, you and Vicky kind of have like a songwriting thing. But then you discover Tom.
Kelly, Yeah, Philly stigin very good.
Yeah. How did that kind of song How did that kind of songwriting trio happen?
Oh, that's great question.
I think that by the time Different Light had run its cycle out in the world and all the touring and you know, us opening for Queen at slain Castle, and just like everything had shot up, you know, with the success of that record, and our our lives were not our own lives.
That we were living.
Like what happens when that when that occurs in the journey of a band, you know. So we after living like so closely for so long and being on tour and having no autonomy everyone in the band, but we decided, Okay, that's the end of that tour cycle, let's start writing for the next record, the next record, And no one wanted to write with each other, like everyone wanted to be totally away from the other members, so like just needed autonomy. So somehow I met Billy, and Billy introduced me to Tom and we just hit it off. As a songwriting team. Immediately I had heard some of the stuff they had done, and I thought they were great, and they were so fun, and their work partnership was strong, and they really knew each one brought a very specific thing to the table. Billy was very much the lyricist, but you know, had melodic ideas as well, and arrangement ideas. And Tom was just like this incredible melody maker machine. You know, he was just he just would sit at the piano or go to the guitar, or go back to the piano, and just to be in the room during all this creation with them was extraordinary, and I was so impressed with songs that they had written, so I just started to hang out with them and do songwriting sessions with them. An eternal Flame was me sharing I'd just been back from a Bengals tour and we did Graceland like all bands have to do. But the day we were there, Elvis's eternal Flame in the Garden of Memories was basically a plexiglass box with a little flame in it, but it was out because the rain had filled up the box with rain water and extinguished the flame. It was out that day, but we were recreating the scene in spinal Tap where there's singing heartbreak Hotel and raga harmonies or whatever.
They were tempting the harmonies and they were face Bill.
So we were doing that and I came back to La I had my writing session with Billy, because Billy always wanted to write lyrics first, which again was unusual to me because I always thought melody first, and we'll just jabber something and the lyric will find itself later. But with Billy, he really had a really strong practice in doing bringing a lyric to Tom. So we just sat down. I was just telling him the story about the Eternal Flame at Graceland it was out, and he went, eternal Flame. That's a great name for a song. And I was like, yeah, you're right, and we just sat down, did the lyrics, and we drove over to Tom's and we just started working on the music. But when that turn came in on the two. It's a weird structure that song because it doesn't have a proper chorus. It's just the tagline is this burning and eternal flame at the ends of the verses. So what really was like the moment of like, uh, you know, the sun breaking through the clouds. Was that actually it fit with those lyrics sunshines through the rain, the bridge that repeats, and there's a really cool place for a guitar solo in the middle of it. So it's like verse verse bridge solo bridge verse out, and those bridges were just like I knew. When that happened, I was like, shit, man, this is good, you know, this is oh wow, what is this? This is great and felt so good to sing that.
It is a strange song structure, it's not traditional song structural.
But those bridges were just so beautiful and so fun to sing. And the other part was like kind of a here, there and everywhere, kind of you know, be lesque, very very blesque.
The verses, yeah, yeah, pretty cool.
But it was a real afterthought putting it out, and it was it hardly made the record.
It didn't.
It wasn't voted. We had a thing where we had a band meeting and everybody had gone off.
Everyone needed to go off and write.
With other people. Everyone was sick of each other. When we got back together, everyone you know, kind of showed their wares. This is what I wrote, was so and so and so and so, and everybody voted and Eternal Flame didn't make it, and I was like, wait, it should be in there.
I was like really stunned.
Actually, I thought it was like we could use like a good old fashioned ballad like that, you know, But it didn't and we It wasn't until halfway to three quarters of the way through recording that album that David Segresson said, you know what, I think it's a mistake not to put Eternal Flame on here. Let's let's go over to my friend who's a keyboard player. Phil Chanel was his name, and let's mess around with a Patsy Cline esque arrangement because I was obsessed with Patsy Cline. I had discovered her around that time and I think the movie had come out, and yeah, I was just blown away by her singing and gorgeous voice, so so amazing and her story. Yeah, so we went and worked with Phil and it ended up.
On the record.
Did you guys have to regroup and read?
Yeah, I mean it was a weird phase at that point where everybody was very much aware of like I want to make sure my songs are that everything was like very parsed out. Equally, it was less bandish at that point and davidt you know, was a change in producer. Having had David Kahn on the first two records, Davitt could see what was going on even in our behind the music. His interview, He's like, they were an odd kind of band we were.
At that point.
It just when you have four singer songwriters in a band, you have to figure out how to make that work. And it is a lot of personalities. And that's the great thing about bands, you know. Some of the things that make bands great are their conflicts. Are are the ways that they with a disconnects are how disparate points of view can come together and make something bigger than you know this, what's that expression? That some of its parts that yeah, yeah so. But Eternal Flame was a definite afterthought and it was It was the third single released on that Alpha album. It was not the first single.
In Your Room.
Was which which was.
That's another Billy and Tom song And that was like me going full George michael on that I wanted that to sound like?
Was it faith? Was that?
The that the song that very dry, very dry, not no reverb like the big eighties reverb. It was so starkly dry and so like crispin in your face. That was like I kept obsessively telling David that I wanted it to have that sound. Yeah, very dry.
And you also did with with with Tom and Billy. Did Belinda Carlisle song?
Oh yeah, what was it?
I need a dis I need a disguy.
Yeah. Oh I sang on that record, Yeah I did. I did. I think, I'm I think I did some back. Oh yeah.
Oh Gods and the Bengal Yeah.
Yeah, that was always well.
I I love the Go Gos, you know, like, I think they inspired me. I didn't feel competitive with them. In fact, I just wanted to hang out with them, and I had seen them, I think even before I met Vicky and Debbie through the ad in the paper that I had put out advertising for other like minded musicians, especially girls. The Go Gos really honestly inspired me to want to be in a band with other girls.
Oh yeah, wow Fully.
Their songs I think were very sixties inspired, so I felt a kinship there and like a shared sensibility. Belinda was came from the punk scene very much. I mean she used to dressing garbage bags.
They were very off.
They were avant garde to me, and that was what I was interested in. They were people who found each other and figured out how to collaborate.
I guess a girl group not being a pop act at that time.
A girl group compared to a girl band.
A girl band, right, You guys run through the eighties is like incredible? Was there the thought that parting ways was a mistake. I can't imagine being at like the peak of you guys's powers as a foursome. Yeah, just like oh man, maybe yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
I think that when you when you have very little autonomy because your career is so pervading thing that you have to, you know, show up for, you feel a little bit claustrophobic after a while, and you start to kind of wonder what life would be like if you weren't bound by you know what three other people are and a management team are kind of pressing you to do. And I think that by the time we played sn L in nineteen end of nineteen eighty eight, that was a very stressful situation. There was a lot of frustration in some members of the band about, you know, what the perception of the band was. There was some feeling that people were deeming me a lead singer in the band, not just wanted to. Everyone's a singer, so I think that. And I just think living, you know, on mass and on tour for so long, and also having managers you know, wanting you to do that because they benefit from it. I mean, it's the oldest story in show business that artists get to a breaking point at some point along the journey and they're just like, I want to go home, and I want to meet someone that I can have in my life.
And not be on the road and lonely.
And as we were all looking at thirty approaching third, it just felt like we needed a break.
And then we took one.
And then we did regroup multiple times and did did But then it has a different vibe to it. Once you decide to take a break, it's it's not it's not ever quite the same as that that initial existence you're living.
It's kind of familiar to most people who are like, ever take a break from a relationship or something. You know, then you come back and you're like, yeah, maybe it works out, but it's like, it's not, it's never.
Yeah, it doesn't have that first magical, you know, excitement to it. Perhaps yeah, and we did It's interestingly in my perspective to how when the times that we kind of came back and made records and with different record labels or did them ourselves. Most people that I talked to didn't have any idea that we were still a band. It was like the more we did, the less people were like aware.
I don't know why that was.
But it's so much I guess was changing too about the industry.
And I mean, Nirvana happened. Like what do you do when your whole mind is blown by a band like Nirvana and you're like, holy shit, this is genius, like brilliant music and you're like.
Oh, oh my god.
You know, but you also have at that same exact time, you know, Janet Jackson, you know, coming out with all this incredible like the nineties. Yeah, you know, the nineties happened. Yeah, time March is on and it's like.
How do you wear?
Yeah?
It was great, but you also kind of just the eighties were like this interesting bubble.
It was very iconoclastic time for music. It was so many different things.
It's strange how that the twentieth century you really can kind of divide things up neatly by more roughly to the actual decades, you know, like sometimes it's like eighty one the eighties star rather than eight or what you know, But you.
Like, the nineties was so different, don't you think?
So different? And I don't know that I feel the difference from decade to decade anymore, Like you know, I don't.
Know, sixties to seventies to eighties to nineties each one, and really fifties through nineties if you think about it, it's from that whole chunk of a century. Ye in a way, right, I mean, it was really notable that what was going on, like the styles, the sounds, the vibes, all of it.
Thank you so much for this letting us into your.
This was amazing. This was very in depth. I feel great more.
I feel like I'm leaving things on the table.
No, no, we're good. We're good.
Thank you Susannahas for taking us through her career with the Bangles and talking about the creation of her new novel, This Bird Has Flown. You can hear all of our favorite songs featuring Susanna on a playlist at Broken record podcast dot com. Subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced with help from Lea Rose and Eric Sandler. Our show is engineered by Echo Mountain. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four to ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richman.
