Susanna Hoffs catapulted to stardom as part of the Bangles, the power poppers who rose from Los Angeles' Paisley Underground and into the Top 40 with "Manic Monday," a Prince song that Hoffs sang for the group. She sang the lion's share of the Bangles' big hits -- providing the closing verses on both "Walk Like an Egyptian" and "Hazy Shade of Winter" and taking the lead on "Walking Down Your Street," "In Your Room," and "Eternal Flame" -- positioning herself nicely for the solo career she launched with the 1991 release of When You're a Boy. Neither When You're a Boy nor its eponymous 1996 successor was a commercial success, so Hoffs returned to the guitar pop she loved best, first reuniting with the Bangles for 2003's Doll Revolution, then cutting a series of covers albums with Matthew Sweet in the 2000s and 2010s. By the 2020s, Hoffs had resumed a solo career with Bright Lights and The Deep End, a pair of records where she covered some of her favorite songwriters.
Hoffs was born in Los Angeles, California on January 17, 1959; her father, Joshua Hoffs, was a physician, while her mother, Tamar Simon Hoffs, was a screenwriter and film director. Susanna was the second of three children, and she and her siblings learned to play guitar from their uncle, a folk musician who also built dulcimers. Hoffs grew up on classic AM radio pop and literate, folk-influenced artists such as Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt; she enjoyed singing with family and friends but was more interested in pursuing acting or dance as a career (she played a small role in the 1978 film Stony Island, an acclaimed independent feature co-written by her mother) until she enrolled as a ballet student at UC Berkeley.
After her big brother passed along albums by the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads, and Susanna saw Patti Smith perform in San Francisco, she became a quick convert to the new wave, and formed an informal band with her brother and David Roback, a friend from the neighborhood who played guitar. While the trio proved short-lived, Hoffs and Roback, who were a couple for a while, recorded some living-room demos that emboldened her to form a band. (Echoes of these unreleased recordings can be heard on the 1984 album Rainy Day, coordinated by Roback after he became leader of the acclaimed Paisley Underground band Rain Parade; Hoffs contributes striking lead vocals to versions of the Velvet Underground's "I'll Be Your Mirror" and Bob Dylan's "I'll Keep It with Mine.")
Looking for like-minded musicians, Hoffs answered an ad in an L.A. weekly newspaper, The Recycler, in late 1980 and met guitarist Vicki Peterson and her sister Debbi Peterson, who played drums; the three shared a fondness for '60s-influened pop/rock and the Petersons were impressed with Hoffs' vocal abilities. The three formed a band called the Colours that would quickly evolve into the Bangs and became the Bangles after a threat of legal action from another group called the Bangs. From: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/susanna-hoffs-mn0000043241#biography
