Susanna Hoffs on How an ‘Identity Crisis’ Shaped ‘The Lost Record’

A post-Bangles (the first time) Susanna Hoffs already had one solo album, When You’re a Boy, behind her and was starting to conceive her second when she got a call from David Baerwald, Dan Schwartz and some of the other musicians involved in Sheryl Crow’s Tuesday Night Music Club — and began a long path to The Lost Record, a collection of those songs and their subsequent recordings that comes out Oct. 18 on Baroque Folks Records.

“They were just reaching out to me; I went to David Kitay’s studio and we kind of created our own version of something along the lines of what they had done with Tuesday Night Music Club,” Hoffs recalls for Billboard via Zoom. “It was, like, meeting together weekly. We would sit around, working on songs. There was one day when Joni Mitchell showed up; I have a recording of David Baerwald, me and Joni singing ‘Love Potion No. 9.’ She really loved that song.”

That’s not one of the 10 tracks on The Lost Record, but it would actually be another few years before Hoffs actually recorded those songs — during 1999, in the garage of her home on Blythe Avenue in west Los Angeles, where she was living with husband Jay Roach and their two young children. “Dan Schwartz reached out to me and said, ‘You want to make some music? Should we continue where we left off from the David Baerwald sessions?’” recalls Hoffs, who had reunited with the Bangles a year prior to record “Get the Girl” for Roach’s film Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. She would tour with the group in 2000, but at the time of The Lost Record sessions considered herself in “a non-Bangles chapter.”

“I told Dan, ‘Yeah, but can we do it in my garage. I have a new baby and I’m kind of staying at home right now.’ He said, ‘Yeah,’ and we had all these great people — Jim Keltner, Dan, Brian MacLeod, all these people. It was a true garage band situation, which I loved. The Bangles were formed in the garage of my childhood home, so I’ve had a lifetime of recording in garages.”

The Lost Record hardly sounds slapdash however. The songs — including the psychedelic-flavored “Under a Cloud,” which surfaced the Bangles recorded for its 2011 album Sweetheart of the Sun — is dominated by nuanced singer-songwriter fare such as “I Don’t Know Why,” “Grateful,” “November Rain,” “As It Falls Apart” and “Who Will She Be,” and orchestrated pieces like “I’ll Always Love You (The Anti-Heartbreak Song),” “I Will Take Care of You” and “Life on the Inside,” the latter a co-write with Jane Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Go’s.

“I grew up in the Bangles but the Go-Go’s had come before that and they had really inspired me, the idea of an all-girl band,” Hoffs notes. “So to write with Charlotte and Jane was really special. It was just a very creative time. I was reaching out to all the people that I’d known and loved during the ’80s into the ’90s. It was like a friend group, a creative friend group.”

Lyrically, Hoffs acknowledges that The Lost Album‘s songs found her grappling with “this sort of identity crisis. I was a mom and married to a filmmaker and living this so-called grownup-life and finding myself at a crossroads, like, ‘How do I juggle all this stuff?’ and trying to figure out how to ‘Do it all.’” The deceptively uptempo “Living Alone With You” in particular was inspired by how, with Roach’s filmmaking career taking off, the couple “were like ships crossing in the night.”

“It was such a reflective time, a really emotional time,” she remembers. “I think when your emotions are right up at the surface like that it’s a great time to write songs.”

Hoffs does not remember why The Lost Record became, well lost. “I think it became a little bit fraught,” she says. “There was some discourse between some of the personalities, I think, and maybe it was because the Bangles wanted to get back together and I felt that I had to park this, somehow, for the greater good. It was so long ago. It was just, like the stars were not aligning or something, and I had to shelve it.

“But I’ve always loved these sessions. I had such a fondness for the material and for these recordings because they were so honest and sort of basic and stripped down. It was so much the spirit of creativity in that garage. I’m so glad it’s coming out, finally.”

Hoffs is hoping to play some of the songs live; she mentions the possibility of returning to playing regularly at the Largo nightclub, as she’s done in the past. She has other project in motion, too, including a Bangles documentary and second book to follow-up her 2023 novel This Bird Has Flown, which Universal has optioned for a film adaptation. And Hoffs is working on a new album of her own to follow last year’s The Deep End, which she says will combine new songs with re-recordings of Bangles favorites accompanied by New York’s YMusic string ensemble and should be out next year.

“I’m bounding around, doing music and my next book and whatever,” Hoff says. “I live for art, and art and music has always driven me. I think when I put my mind to something and have such a passion for it, I can’t stop myself. I’m so grateful I’ve had that ability in my life.”