Susanna Hoffs has been writing down names in a notebook for…

Susanna Hoffs has been writing down names in a notebook for forty years. Now she's turned it into an album

22.09.2026 18:30 HotInfo

Susanna Hoffs has a list. As a teenager in Los Angeles, she began keeping it in a leather notebook — writing down the names of everyone she'd ever been with. She started out as a high schooler passionate about art, teaching herself guitar by strumming along to her mother's Beatles records. Rolling Stone Deutschland ↗

The list grew in the eighties, as Hoffs became a celebrated rock star. With her band The Bangles, she sang one big hit after another — from "Manic Monday" through "Walk Like an Egyptian" to "Eternal Flame" — and commanded the stage on MTV. The Bangles made history as one of the few all-female rock bands of their era, four Californian girls who kicked down doors for women musicians. And the whole time, she kept scribbling names into that same notebook. Rolling Stone Deutschland ↗

"There are all kinds of names in there," she says today with a laugh over coffee in a New York hotel. "A few actors. Honestly, also a few total losers. Then I'd note when it was a one-night thing — that's when a one would go there, or maybe a two." She grins mischievously: "It's a juicy list." Rolling Stone Deutschland ↗

Years later, she turned that notebook into the album The List — her first collection of original songs in fourteen years. "It was fun to revisit not just the old memories, but the whole arc of the thing across the decades," she says. The record is full of her signature folk-rock touches and looks back on a long, winding, and remarkable life in music. Hoffs built a reputation as one of the sharpest performers in rock, with an unerring sense for cover versions — which is probably also why she was always oddly underrated as a songwriter. Forty years after The Bangles first topped the charts, she's ready to tell her stories. Rolling Stone Deutschland ↗