As she prepares to release The List, her first album of all-new material since 2012’s Someday, former Bangle Susanna Hoffs has been reflecting on her storied career and discussing her encounters with a couple of music legends, both of whom she has a creative connection with.
Hoffs worked on The List with CJ Camerieri, a musician and producer who’s previously collaborated with Paul Simon and Bon Iver. And, speaking to the Los Angeles Times, she says that while staying with Simon on the Texas ranch that he shares with wife Edie Brickell – Brickell co-wrote What Are Wings For, the final track on The List – he revealed something to her.
“He also told me that he thinks the Bangles’ version of A Hazy Shade of Winter [a song from 1968 Simon & Garfunkel album Bookends] is better than his,” laughs Hoffs. “I was like, ‘Please don’t – yours is the iconic version.’”
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The Bangles released their rockier, Rick Rubin-produced version of A Hazy Shade of Winter in 1987, and it ended up being a pretty big hit. In fact, it’s probably better-known than the original, so perhaps Simon has a point.
One song that the Bangles didn’t write but is definitely ‘theirs’, of course, is 1985’s Manic Monday, which came courtesy of none other than Prince. Hoffs says that she still has the original cassette demo of the track that Prince sent her (following his death in 2016, this version got an official release on the posthumous Originals album in 2019) and has fond memories of the time she spent with him.
“He was brilliant but mischievous,” she recalls. “I remember one time he invited us to Sunset Sound [studio] in the middle of the night. We get there and we’re jamming, then suddenly we look around and he’s disappeared. ‘OK, I guess we’re done.’”
The List will be released on 18 September, and lead single Casablanca – which is inspired by both the film of the same name and a “surreal” New Orleans encounter Hoffs had with the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir in 1988 – is out now.
