Susanna Hoffs

Susanna Hoffs (born January 17, 1959) is an American singer, guitarist, songwriter, author, and actress.

Susanna Lee Hoffs was born in Los Angeles, California, on January 17, 1959.

She is the daughter of film director/writer/producer Tamar Ruth (née Simon) and Joshua Allen Hoffs, a psychoanalyst.

She is the couple's only daughter; they also have two sons John and Jesse.

She described the home environment as an "atheist, intellectual, creative world".

Her maternal grandfather was a rabbi in Chicago.

Hoffs visited Israel for the first time at the age of 12 to visit her grandparents.

Hoffs learned ballet as a child and started playing guitar in elementary school, learning chords from her uncle.

She later recorded several songs for movies, and formed the faux British 1960s band Ming Tea, with Mike Myers and Matthew Sweet, which performed in all three Austin Powers movies.

Hoffs teamed with Sweet to produce three albums of cover songs.

The band was originally called the Colours, but changed it to the Supersonic Bangs after Hoffs saw an article about 1960s hairstyles in an old copy of Esquire, and subsequently to the Bangs.

Hoffs said that the group "liked the double-entendre of the name" and that "you can read a lot into it. There was something kind of gutsy about it".

Meanwhile, Annette Zilinskas joined as the bass player alongside Hoffs on rhythm guitar, Vicki Peterson on lead guitar, and Debbie Peterson on drums.

The group's musical influences included the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Hollies.

Hoffs and the Petersons shared lead vocals.

In the late 1970s, while Hoffs was a student at UC Berkeley, she and then-boyfriend David Roback (a former schoolmate from Palisades High School), formed the duo, the Psychiatrists, later changing their name to the Unconscious.

Hoffs appeared in the films Stony Island (1978) and The Haircut (1982), both written by her mother, Tamar Simon Hoffs.

While in college, she worked as a production assistant and made her acting debut as part of a cast that included Richie Davis, Rae Dawn Chong, and Dennis Franz, in the 1978 film Stony Island directed by Andrew Davis and co-written by Hoffs' mother, Tamar Simon Hoffs.

With college friends, she attended the final Sex Pistols show at Winterland Ballroom and a Patti Smith concert which inspired her to pursue a career in music.

She attended Palisades High School and received a bachelor's degree in art in 1980 from the University of California, Berkeley, where she switched majors between dance, theater, film, and art.

Hoffs, Debbi Peterson, and Vicki Peterson founded the Bangles in 1981.

They played at venues in Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley, and recorded "Getting Out of Hand", which they released on their own label, Downkiddie in 1981, pressing 1,000 copies.

They released their first album All Over the Place on Columbia Records in 1984.

She starred in the comedy movie The Allnighter (1987), directed by her mother, which was a commercial and critical failure.

In a 1987 Rolling Stone interview, Susan Orlean described the band's early audiences as "mostly boys, who appreciated their tough-enough music and playfully flirtatious stage presence".

Author James Dickerson later characterized the group's loyal audience as "made up of horny high-school and college-age males who relished their in-your-face sexuality", and noted that the musicians had gained their success through their own efforts, without intervention from any man.

The group's third album, Everything (1988), included the US top-ten hit "In Your Room" and number one "Eternal Flame", both written by Hoffs with Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly.

Following tensions in the band that included resentment at Hoffs being perceived as the band's leader, the group split in 1989.

Her first solo album, When You're a Boy (1991), was followed by Susanna Hoffs (1996).

Neither of the releases proved to be as popular as the Bangles' albums, although they yielded two charting singles in the US, the Top-40 hit "My Side of the Bed", and "All I Want".

The Bangles re-formed in 1999 and released albums in 2003 and 2011.

Her next solo album Someday (2012) was followed by the cover albums Bright Lights (2021) and The Deep End (2023).

Hoffs' first novel, This Bird Has Flown, a romantic comedy about a struggling musician, was published by Little Brown in 2023.

It received favorable reviews, and Universal Pictures purchased the rights to the novel for a screen adaptation.

In one account, Hoffs said that the short-lived group would perform for 50 minutes, to reflect the duration of "psychiatrists' hours", yet in a 2012 interview when Hoffs was asked when she first performed in front of people, she replied that she had a band with David Roback in Berkeley but they never performed for anybody.

She said that the first real performance was with the Bangles and they played at the Laird Movie Studio.

There are different accounts of how Hoffs met the other musicians who became the Bangles.

Hoffs either posted an ad in a local newspaper and left flyers at the Whisky a Go Go at a Go-Go's concert in search of potential bandmates, or Hoffs answered a similar ad asking for musicians to join a group.

In the second scenario, the woman who advertised had previously been in a group with sisters Vicki and Debbi Peterson, and shared a house with them.

Hoffs elected to form a group with the Petersons rather than with the original advertiser, and they started the band in Hoffs' parents' garage in Brentwood, which had been refurbished as an apartment for Hoffs.