Susanna Hoffs has always understood the value of jumping first and figuring out how to swim later. It’s how she wound up in a band that would become The Bangles, how she navigated pop stardom without losing her center, and now how she’s emerged on the other side of the pandemic with a new album, a novel, and a finished screenplay like it’s the most reasonable thing in the world.
“It all kind of overlaps,” she says, laughing, trying to reconstruct a timeline that resists being pinned down. The novel came first — quietly, privately, over years. “It was an absolute labor of love,” she says. “I’d wanted to do it my whole life.” She didn’t study writing. Didn’t outline. “Like music, I’m self-taught. I just learned from books I loved.”
That instinct — learning by immersion — is the connective tissue between The Deep End and her novel This Bird Has Flown. Both are about surrendering to momentum. Both are about escape. “It’s escapist for me,” she says of reading and writing. “I can disappear into somebody else’s journey and get out of my own head.”
The album title comes from a Holly Humberstone song, but the phrase hit deeper. “It fit everything,” Hoffs says — the book, the music, her memories of the early ’80s. Fresh out of UC Berkeley, chasing Patti Smith and the Sex Pistols around San Francisco, she didn’t hesitate. “I just threw myself into the deep end and hoped I could stay afloat.”
The book follows a one-hit wonder in the present tense — a woman who had a massive song at 23, written by someone else, and now finds herself ten years later doing private gigs and questioning how she got here. It’s not autobiography, but it flirts with alternate timelines. “Songs are more memoir-esque,” Hoffs says. Fiction gave her freedom. “The characters are like dolls. You get to play.”
If the book was solitary, the album arrived as a lifeline. During the depths of the pandemic — when live music felt impossible and Zoom songwriting felt like an insult — Hoffs got a call from producer Peter Asher. “It was like sun shining through the rain,” she says. Once vaccines arrived, she started driving to Malibu, sitting in a room with a guitar, trying on songs “like dresses.” If it fit, she knew immediately.
The result is a covers record, but instead of leaning backward, The Deep End reaches forward — Billie Eilish, Holly Humberstone, Joy Oladokun, Brandi Carlile — alongside Squeeze, Yazoo, and the Rolling Stones. “I don’t think of myself as a ‘covers artist,’” Hoffs says. “Elvis sang other people’s songs. Sinatra sang other people’s songs.”
What holds it together isn’t era, but texture. A string quartet threads through nearly every track, giving the record a cinematic continuity. Hoffs traces that instinct back to childhood. “When I was a kid, my ears would perk up if I heard a harpsichord or an oboe on the radio,” she says. “Those little details always tickled my fancy. That feels like a very old-fashioned thing to say.”
Arrangement has always mattered to her. It’s why “Only You” blooms in three dimensions, why “Black Coffee in Bed” slides from new wave ache into something warmer and soul-soaked, why the French horn in Yazoo’s “Only You” feels like a small miracle all over again. Working with Asher meant no idea was too indulgent. “It was like asking for the moon and getting it,” she says.
There are also moments of pure fan joy. Covering Coconut Records meant inviting Jason Schwartzman into the studio to hear what she’d done with his song. She sneaked in a tiny drum flourish at the end — a nod to Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” — and waited. “He goes, ‘I love that ride cymbal thing at the end,’” she says. “Peter looked at me and smiled. I felt so validated.”
The past isn’t avoided here; it’s just not in charge. Revisiting Squeeze and Yazoo felt natural. “These are songs I’ve always sung along to,” Hoffs says. “I’ve been singing the harmony to ‘Only You’ forever. I finally got my chance.”
Somehow, all of this — album, book, screenplay — landed at once. The novel was optioned early. Hoffs wrote the adaptation herself. Casting ideas live in her head like a private mood board. She talks about rock movies the way musicians talk about holy texts. Almost Famous sits at the top. Spinal Tap is the truth-teller. “Anyone who wants to know what it’s like to be in a band should watch that,” she says. “Ups, downs, nobody caring when you put out a record — it’s all there.”
What’s striking isn’t the workload, but the tone. Hoffs sounds energized, amused, genuinely delighted by it all. “I get to do this now?” she says, still sounding surprised. Maybe that’s the secret. Jump first. Sort it out later. The deep end, after all, is where the stories are.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
