The Bangles Were Always a Democracy

“The momentum started to gather like a snowball going down the hillside. We started to get bigger and bigger, and we were rolling with it.” Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Michael Tran/FilmMagic

When the Purple One heard a song you wrote, loved it, and insisted on gifting one of his own in gratitude, allow yourself a few minutes to freak the hell out before getting back to work. That’s exactly what happened to the Bangles while they were recording their second album, 1986’s Different Light, when Susanna Hoffs found herself with a demo of Prince’s “Manic Monday.” The lyrics, lamenting the start of the corporate week, were all there. The group just needed to make it their own. Or, as they prefer to say, “Bangle-fy” it. “Prince was wise — he gave a lot of songs away to artists and singers that he liked and felt a kinship to,” Hoffs says. “He was onto something with us.” Although the band had plenty of songs co-written by Hoffs, Vicki Peterson, Debbi Peterson, and Michael Steele to consider for Different Light’s lead single, “Manic Monday” fell into place without much debate. It became the band’s first big hit, peaking at No. 2 on the Hot 100.

While Hoffs is doubtful that the Bangles will record another album together — they have five in total, their most recent is 2011’s Sweetheart of the Sun — she is putting together a documentary about the band after a busy year of releasing singles from her own archive. She’s also optimistic that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame will soon recognize the group’s achievements. Despite being eligible since 2007, the Bangles have never made a shortlist of nominees, and Hoffs admits it would be a “dream” to get in. Frankly, it’s overdue. Her songs, both for the group and just for herself, are an eternal celebration: “They’re all fueled by a strong emotion that I’m trying to find the words for.”

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The Song

“Hero Takes a Fall” was one of the first songs I co-wrote with Vicki. We wrote it in the garage where I lived in my parents’ house; it had been converted into very funky living quarters. This was our big first opportunity to be working with Columbia Records, and an executive mentioned that we had previously written a lot of songs in the style of a “cow beat” — like, oompah-oompah, almost a country style. I don’t know how else to describe it. But they told us, “Why don’t you do something in more of a straight style?” A four-on-the-floor kind of beat. So Vicki and I started jamming on the guitar, writing in a rhythm that was a bit different than we’d written in before. My parents had a book that was a big, fat Oxford volume I brought into the garage for inspiration. It was about the greatest plays of all time, like Socrates and all these old, original plays. There was a section in the book that talked about how in these dramas, the hero will always take a fall somehow. It’s part of the conceit of that type of playwriting. I remember flipping through the book and I showed Vicki that language and she was like, “There’s a title, there’s a theme.” That was the impetus for writing it.

We were playing on our thighs with our palms and coming up with the rhythm of the lyrics. It was almost like a rap in a way. Then we just started putting the chord changes in and the pre-chorus, and it had the tagline, “And the hero takes a fall / I won’t feel bad at all when the hero takes a fall.” It had a lot of angst in it. There’s lore that it was written about Steve Wynn from the Dream Syndicate. That was never my memory. It was ultimately a “real” rock-and-roll song, and we were sort of a mix of the Mamas & the Papas. Or as we like to say for us, the Mamas & the Mamas. We love our lush, four-part harmonies. It also didn’t follow the three-minute pop song rule. It’s not exactly a typical song you hear on Top 40 radio. Vicki and I felt that we turned a corner in our songwriting partnership with it.

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The Bet

We were privy to the conversations about what the label was thinking for single releases. It felt very true to the Bangles. Unlike our follow-up single, “Going Down to Liverpool,” this was an original song and not a cover. We wanted a song written by us. The band was pretty unanimous in thinking “Hero Takes a Fall” would be the right song.

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The Payoff

It led to Prince giving us “Manic Monday,” but I think it mostly cemented the idea that the Bangles were a real band and we had credibility. It’s like Peter Pan: “I’m a real boy!” I was never really thinking about the business side of it. Our goals were, initially, just to be a good band, but of course we wanted to be successful. Once you get signed to a label, it feels like someone believes in you or believes in us as an entity, but you still have to prove yourself.

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The Song

Prince was always very mysterious. I was told to drive to the iconic Sunset Sound Studios, so I got in my beat-up Toyota with the ripped upholstery and made my way over there. I’m bracing myself to hang out with him, but he was recording when I arrived, so the cassette was left at the front desk for me. I still have that exact cassette. When I got back to our studio, we all hovered around a cassette player and immediately knew it was a fantastic song. It embodied the Paisley Underground, baroque folk, and baroque rock sounds of the ’60s. The information was leaked that Prince wrote it, but it didn’t come from us. He genuinely liked the Bangles because he was such a fan of “Hero Takes a Fall.” He might have had the intention that we would just add our voices to his instrumentation, but that was never really the Bangles’ thing. We wanted to build the track from the ground up. We weren’t just adding our voices. So for us, it was very intentional that Debbi would play drums on it, Michael would play bass, I’d play rhythm guitar, and Vicki would play lead guitar. If we wanted to add any bells and whistles with a keyboard or who knows what, we would also throw those on. We always recorded our own tracks in the way we wanted.

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The Bet

Everyone’s instinct was to put out “Manic Monday,” but I don’t know how much the Prince connection had to do with it. He listed himself in the songwriting credit as “Christopher.” He preferred that it wasn’t so overt. It really was the obvious choice — I don’t recall ever seriously considering “Walk Like an Egyptian” in its place. Funny enough, the record company decided to throw “Walk Like an Egyptian” out there several months later and see what would happen. It was one of those homegrown things where the kids were calling into the stations saying, “Play that fun walking like an Egyptian song.” It unexpectedly crept up on us.

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The Payoff

Prince’s “Kiss” kept us from having a No. 1 song. Our songs were kissing next to each other on the charts. We were on the go continuously after “Manic Monday.” There’s this movie from the 1960s called If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium, which embodies the kind of life where every day you’re in a different city. The song launched the Bangles in a way we hadn’t experienced, yet we were still an opening band. But the momentum started to gather like a snowball going down the hillside. We started to get bigger and bigger, and we were rolling with it.

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The Song

My inspiration was Tommy James & the Shondells’ “Mony Mony.” I wanted that enchanting beat. I loved that song so much as a child and it would always make me want to dance. I thought it would be really fun to write a balls-to-the-wall type of female-empowerment story of teenage or young-adult lust. A woman is driving the whole song. It was around the time George Michael put out “Faith,” and I really liked the dry production and how in-your-face it was. There are records where everything’s kind of swirly and jumbled together, and there are records where everything’s dry and not drenched in reverb so it feels like the person is right there with you. It’s very present. I wanted that present-tense quality close to all the instruments. I usually would let whoever I was dating at the time creep into the story. I was between boyfriends then. But a funny thing about writing is you kind of don’t know where all of the inspirations come from — you’re just happy that they’re coming at all.

The Bangles were getting to a point where everyone needed a little autonomy with writing because we were on the road together all the time. We’re like a family, but there’s very little sense of privacy when you’re joined at the hip for months and months at a time. When we had time to return to Los Angeles and decompress, we would scatter into our different friend groups and try to get work done. I found the relationship of working with Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly wonderful because their skill sets are tremendous. One thing I found different from writing with Vicki was that when we would write together, we conceived the music first and then the lyrics would begin to be informed by the sound of the music. Whereas with Billy and Tom — and this was really unusual for me — we would first sit down and talk about ideas for songs and what we wanted. It was like what I wanted to express and how I wanted the listener to feel. Hopefully, the tangible quality of the emotion would be relatable to another human being. We would then fairly quickly get the lyrics down and go over to Tom’s house because he was extremely proficient with recording equipment and able to whip up demos quickly. That was the process for a song like “In Your Room,” and it was replicated with “Eternal Flame.”

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The Bet

“In Your Room” and “Eternal Flame” are woven a bit closer together than the other lead singles. With every album, we would show our wares to the others and be like, “Here’s my five songs,” or “I wrote ten songs, but these are the ones I think are the best.” I was convinced “Eternal Flame” was one of the best songs I had ever co-written in my life, and I was very, very proud of it. So I presented “In Your Room,” “Eternal Flame,” and a few other songs to the band. “In Your Room” made the cut, but the other girls voted out “Eternal Flame.” I was like … what? I should never liken myself to Bruce Springsteen, but there was this lore about how he recorded Nebraska and would go around with a cassette of it in his pocket because he was so proud. I had that feeling about “Eternal Flame.” I would carry that cassette in my purse and to anyone who wanted to hear it, I’d be like, “This is the song of my life.” The only people who weren’t so into it were the other three girls in the band.

Our producer said, “You know what, Sue? I really love that song too, and I want to find a way to make it work for the Bangles album.” I asked what he had in mind. And he said, “I think it should be piano-driven in a way.” It’s funny because Billy and Tom knew the Bangles weren’t a piano band, so that’s why we did the “Eternal Flame” demo on a guitar. Of course, that worked and it ended up going on Everything and it became our biggest song. After all that, I guess you could say it was a compromise that “In Your Room” became the first single. We didn’t determine what songs would be singles until the album was completed.

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The Payoff

I was thrilled and proud of the song. I love performing “In Your Room” to this day, even though I’ve probably aged out of the demographic that might be listening. But you’re never too old to be in love and you’re never too old to have a crush, so maybe I won’t even think that way anymore. You never know what’s going to catch on, so the fact that it got to No. 5 was exhilarating. To even be in the Top 40 is a gift.

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The Song

The Go-Go’s were always an inspiration to me. When I peppered around record stores and the Whisky a Go Go in the late ’70s, I would see flyers for the Go-Go’s and would make time to see them perform. Over the course of decades, I became friends with Belinda Carlisle and recorded with her and then I did a lot of songwriting with Charlotte Caffey. “Something That You Said” was one of those songs. The ’90s served as a period where we had all moved on and were living different lives, but I never stopped writing songs. Charlotte and I decided to make music together just for fun. There was zero competition. I was assuming I was just going to make another solo record, but then the Bangles decided to reunite and Vicki came in and helped finish the lyrics. I always like to write about human connection, love, and lust.

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The Bet

When the Bangles regrouped, I wanted to go in with an open heart, an open mind, and be collaborative. The whole point of revisiting being a band again was trying to find a sound and feel connected to one another’s songs. In the spirit of that, “Something That You Said” was a group decision on how we wanted to reintroduce ourselves. Picking songs was always tricky territory because everybody was always advocating or wishing or hoping that something they were most proud of would find itself in that position to be considered a single. Weirdly, it’s very easy to talk about the ’80s because it’s encapsulated as that decade. But for this album cycle, I had kids and Debbi was having kids. Our lives were exponentially complicated by virtue of splitting up and coming back together. So I don’t recall exactly how we decided, but I was happy “Something That You Said” was chosen.

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The Payoff

Every band is a dysfunctional family. I don’t mean that in a negative sense, really; all families are somewhat dysfunctional, and there’s nothing wrong with dysfunction as long as it’s not extreme. You just have to figure out how to make art by committee. That’s really the challenge when we talk about “bands as family.” You have to navigate those waters. It’s always worth any trouble. I don’t know if I had great expectations with the album in general because they had become more measured by that time. I also didn’t have any expectations for charting. That said, you hope something will catch on. It’s tricky, right? I don’t think I took it extremely hard that Doll Revolution didn’t chart. It was such a singular focus in the ’80s. We were young, and we were on the treadmill that we couldn’t get off. Now we could stop the treadmill whenever we wanted to.

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The Song

This was another song that Charlotte and I started and Vicki added lyrics to complete it. One of the themes of love that I return to over and over again is Can you trust it? Will it always be there? We’re born alone and we die alone, in a sense. I feel choked up thinking about this, actually, because you want to know that you’re secure in your love and there will be undying love. You want to know you’re not alone, but even the best marriages or relationships can make you feel intensely lonely, not seen, or misunderstood. Nothing is infallible. Life is not. Anything could happen at any time. Sometimes we walk around with a false sense of security, but shit happens. A lot of those themes have run through my own life, but I don’t want to get into deeply personal stuff about losses that have happened within my family and Jay’s family. “I’ll Never Be Through With You” is this desperate desire to have wish fulfillment. A line like “I don’t want to give up this feeling, deep as the ocean, floating on air.” There’s a kind of romantic love implied there. It’s about how tentative love can be and craving for it not to be the case.

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The Bet

This was a committee decision by us. The Bangles were always a democracy.

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The Payoff

I still couldn’t give you an answer after all these years. All I remember is that we toured for Sweetheart of the Sun, like all of our albums, because we put so much effort into it. It would’ve been a shame to just go, “Let’s throw it out there and see whether it sticks with anybody.” 2011 was an in-between period for streaming. It landed at a weird time. But I’m proud of it.