46 | NOVEMBER 21 • 2024 
J
N

Y

ou know it’s been a 
long music career when 
there’s a lost album in the 
annals. Especially when you can’t 
remember why it became lost in the 
first place. 
Susanna Hoffs is at that point 
now. 
Last month, the Bangles 
frontwoman released The Lost 

Record, a set of 1999 recordings 
that had been stashed away after 
they were made in the garage of 
the west Los Angeles home she 
was living in at the time with her 
husband, film director Jay Roach, 
and their two young children. 
“It was so long ago,” Hoffs, 65, 
says with a laugh via Zoom. “I 
think it became a little bit fraught. 

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 just, like, the stars 
were not aligning or something, 
and I had to shelve it.”
Nevertheless, she says now, “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 was born in Los Angeles, 
and while her psychoanalyst 
father was secular, her mother, 
Hollywood director, writer and 
producer Tamar Ruth, was the 
daughter and niece of rabbis. Hoffs’ 
maternal grandparents lived in 
Israel, and she was bat mitzvahed 
in Jerusalem. The arts were 
encouraged at home, especially 
by her mother who was “a music 
fanatic, always had the radio on.”
“Music was the beginning and 
middle and end of every day, 
according to my mother,” Hoffs 
says. “She listened to the Top 40 
radio of the ’60s, and it just washed 
over me and cast its magical spell. 
I was the kid who was always 
singing along and just trying to 
mimic Patsy Cline’s perfect vocal 
on ‘Crazy,’ or Dusty Springfield on 
something else.
“I was absorbed and enchanted 
by music my entire life. There was 
no way I wasn’t going to end up 
somehow being a musician.” 
Hoffs began playing guitar 
during elementary school but 
wound up acting professionally 
first, appearing in Stony Island, 
a musical film co-written by her 
mother, while Hoffs was attending 
the University of California-
Berkeley. During that time, she also 
attended the original Sex Pistols’ 
final concert, in San Francisco, and 

ARTS&LIFE
MUSIC

The Bangles’ Susanna Hof
 s releases a set 
of 1999 recordings made in her garage.
The Lost Record

GARY GRAFF CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Susanna 
Hoffs

SHERVIN LAINEZ

