Susanna Hoffs Kept Notes on Her Rock Star Journey. She’s Ready to Tell the Story

Susanna Hoffs has a list. When she was a teenager growing up in L.A., she began keeping her list in a leather-bound notebook. That’s where she started writing down the names of everyone she’s ever dated. She began when she was just an arty high-school kid in the 1970s, learning to play guitar by strumming along with her mom’s Beatles records.

But her list kept growing in the Eighties, when Hoffs suddenly blew up into a wildly famous rock star. With her band, the Bangles , she sang one massive hit after another, from “Manic Monday” to “Walk Like an Egyptian” to “Eternal Flame,” strutting her stuff on MTV. The Bangles were making history as one of their era’s only all-woman rock & roll bands, four California girls kicking down doors for female musicians. Yet all the while, she kept scrawling more names, in that same notebook.

“There’s a whole bunch of different names,” she says today, laughing over coffee in a posh NYC hotel. “Some actors. Some fuckwits, in truth. Then I would note if it was just a one-night thing — it would have a ‘1,’ or maybe a ‘2.’” She flashes a mischievous smile. “It’s a juicy list.”

Years later, Susanna Hoffs has turned that notebook into an excellent album, The List — her first batch of original tunes in 14 years. “It’s been fun to revisit not only the old memories, but the whole arc of the thing, over these decades,” she says. The List is full of her signature folk-rock tricks, looking back on her long, twisted, remarkable life in music. Hoffs has made her name as one of rock’s sharpest interpretive singers, with impeccable taste in covers, which is probably why she’s always been weirdly underrated as a songwriter. But 40 years after the Bangles first topped the charts, she’s ready to tell her stories.

She made the album in her home, with her producer and kindred spirit CJ Camerieri, who’s worked with Bon Iver, Phoebe Bridgers, and Paul Simon. “CJ introduced me to a whole gaggle of musicians I really fell in love with,” she says. They started tinkering in a studio, but soon switched to more familiar ground. “We realized that my house had the best acoustics. It was the coziest, warmest, fuzziest environment. So we recorded the whole album in my living room. It was easy for me — I could just walk downstairs and make coffee, get everybody upbeat and in the mood.” Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

The home environment makes sense, for such a personal project. “I had a Filofax notebook back in the day — this is how old-school I am,” she says. “Very posh, a nice leather diary. Pre-internet, that’s how I kept track of things. But I wrote down the name of my very first boyfriend, from high school. I don’t even know where he is now.” (She mentions his name — it only takes about ten seconds to find him alive and well online, though obviously he’s a civilian so nobody should bust him for fumbling a Bangle.) “So I met the first guy on the list, when I was 17.