The greatness of Everything, the Bangles’ melancholy, masterful breakup album

This essay is divided into two sections: an introduction, with a brief overview of the album’s history and a defense of its greatness; followed by a longer (and quite obsessive) track-by-track breakdown of all 13 songs. Just so what you know what you’re getting into going in. And by the way, if you like the content, consider buying me a coffee! 

In another timeline, Everything marks the start of the Bangles’ imperial phase. The band’s third full-length album, Everything was released in October of 1988, crowning a three-year period in which the Bangles basically lived at the top of the charts. Coming in hot as it did, the LP cruised to platinum and launched back-to-back top 5 singles, including the band’s second number one in the anthemic “Eternal Flame.”

It would have been reasonable to imagine all this would continue. After most of a decade together, the Bangles were at the top of their game as singers and songwriters. They were road warriors who’d honed themselves into an amazing live act. They were massively talented and photogenic young women, and they had the record-industry machine and MTV in their favor. The 90s beckoned with bigger stages and greater heights.

But in the timeline we live in, Everything was the beginning of the end for the Bangles — in the 20th century at least. They broke up suddenly and acrimoniously a year after it was released, in the midst of preparing for an international tour.

Afterwards, they faded into relative obscurity. Susanna Hoffs’ solo career stalled and she was dropped from the band’s label, Columbia, while Vicki and Debbi Peterson and Michael Steele went down different paths, pursuing indie projects or taking time off. It was not really the end: the Bangles would reform in 2000 and write several new chapters in the group’s saga.

But still, Everything represents the end of an era. It’s the end of what Bangles fans call the band’s classic period (neatly bracketed by the start and end of the 80s), and also the end of their major-label output.

And it’s a fascinating document of that era. No one makes albums like Everything anymore, including the Bangles. No one could have made this album except for the Bangles. They were (and still are) an utterly unique band, recording under a peculiar set of circumstances, during a time just before the music industry started undergoing massive and transformative change.

There’s a case to be made that there is no other timeline: that the Bangles would have always imploded as they did under the arduous and, frankly, unfair pressures they endured during their meteoric run on the pop charts. Let’s be real: the Bangles are a case study in the toll the music industry takes on women. It’s difficult to imagine a band of men going through the same things they went through.

The fact is the band was in already crisis during the recording of Everything in the spring and summer of 1988 — a crisis even they couldn’t see the extent of. Unlike many bands, the Bangles had always strived to be a democracy, to split the songwriting and singing as equally as possible among the four members. This worked well when they were a garage band on the Los Angeles underground scene of the early 80s, but the music-industry meat grinder, with its insatiable need for stars and sex appeal, couldn’t deal with that kind of all-for-one, one-for-all egalitarian approach. The project of formatting the Bangles for mass consumption began as soon as they signed to Columbia in 1983. The label’s strategy of positioning Hoffs as the lead singer; the media frenzy over her supposed relationship with Prince; the band’s loss of agency in the recording of their breakout album, 1986’s Different Light; the inexorable efforts to glam them up and make them into sex symbols — all these things combined with years of constant touring and publicity left the band fatigued and troubled. As they finally took a break from touring at the end of 1987 and prepared a follow-up to the double-platinum success of Different Light, their relationships with each other were frayed, and they doubted themselves as artists.

So it was they decamped in four directions and wrote on their own or with outside collaborators, which they hadn’t done to such an extent before. And the result was Everything, a work that is fragmentary by its very nature, an album made up of four sometimes competing perspectives, a mosaic of often radically different styles. Fans refer to Everything as the Bangles’ White Album, and so it is — the work of four increasingly estranged artists presenting their own visions, with the other bandmembers essentially serving as backup, and with a catastrophic breakup looming unforeseen. The band didn’t even record their tracks together — they only shared studio time to record the harmonies.

What may surprise you is that I’m here to argue that all of these factors resulted in a masterpiece. Everything is a fabulous and one-of-a-kind album that not only holds up, but holds together as an amazing listening experience from start to finish.

It may be obvious that I’m approaching this retrospective review as a Bangles obsessive. I’m not even pretending to be objective: I love this band and this album and, while I can still analyze the music critically, I’m also here to sell you on it, especially because of how underrated I believe it is.

The funny thing is, within the Bangles fandom, Everything is far from universally embraced. Many fans uphold the band’s early (and late) garage-rock days as their essential sound, and dismiss their pop era (Different Light and Everything) as an aberration or an injustice.

Now, I agree wholeheartedly about the Bangles’ early work. Their staggeringly brilliant 1984 debut LP All Over the Place is one of my favorite albums of all time. It changed my life as a teenager, singlehandedly inspiring me to get into punk and alternative rock; it made me the music fan I am.

But if it wasn’t for their pop music I never would have heard their earlier stuff in the first place. More importantly, the Bangles’ pop music rules. They made fabulous pop-rock, like no one has before or since — rooted in the best of underground rock but with a wonderfully bright pop shimmer and unearthly four-part harmonies that no rock band has ever matched (no white rock band, anyway).

This is not the space for a long defense of poptimism — the view that rock is not inherently better than pop; that rock is in fact a kind of pop music; and that dimissing pop, as rockists do, leads to all sorts of trouble, including writing off a large body of women’s music.

Suffice it to say I’m a “Bangles poptimist.” To me, a holistic attitude about the Bangles’ pop makes the most sense when you consider how greatly influenced they were by the pop music of the 60s and 70s, from the Ronettes to Burt Bacharach to the Monkees; and the degree to which the Beatles, their single greatest influence, blurred the lines between pop and rock.

There’s another, more valid reason some Bangles fans are dubious about their most successful albums: the perception that the pop sound was imposed on them by their record label and producers. This is slightly reductive. It’s true enough in the case of Different Light, whose producer, David Kahne, is infamous for his overbearing, heavy-handed ways. Kahne minimized or refused input from the bandmembers, exhausted them with his perfectionism, rerecorded many of their instrumental tracks with session musicians, inserted himself into songwriting credits, and ridiculed Debbi Peterson’s singing and drumming to the point that it impacted her mental health.

The irony is that Different Light was a massive hit and sealed the Bangles’ legacy; the band and their fans alike have been living with that paradox ever since. I happen to love the album, while remaining painfully aware of what a difficult experience it was for them — in the same way you can love the Ronettes and acknowledge what a bastard Phil Spector was.

But the circumstances around the recording of Everything were completely different. Because of the frustrations of working with Kahne, and with the leverage they’d won through success, the Bangles demanded a new situation from their label, and went out of their way to headhunt a producer, Davitt Sigerson, who would be collaborative, kind, and easy to work with. And so he was: all involved report a night-and-day difference in the creative process. “It proves that you don’t have to be fucking suicidal to make a worthy album,” Steele told Goldmine in 2000.

So it’s not fair to say the Bangles had the pop sound entirely imposed on them in these years. At least in the case of Everything, the slick, radio-ready quality of the music is something they worked on together with Sigerson. Suggesting otherwise deprives them of agency in a more indirect, insidious way.

Of course they made compromises in crafting a follow-up to a hit album, as any artist might do; and no, they didn’t see eye to eye. But I prefer to be generous, and view Everything as the work of four exceptionally gifted musicians who knew exactly what they were doing.

Everything was released during my senior year in high school, a fraught time for me. I’d just come out of a debilitating and frightening depression that had lasted almost a year. Throughout that time, the prospect of a new album by the Bangles had been a lifeline for me as I followed its progress in Rolling Stone and in the fan club’s newsletters. I was truly obsessive about the band, as only an autistic high-schooler can be. They meant the world to me.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say the Bangles helped me out of my depression; there were a lot of factors and I don’t want to be that simplistic about mental health. Still, I can’t help but associate the album with the overwhelming relief I experienced that fall at feeling like myself again for the first time in a year.

I remember driving to the mall on the Tuesday it was released, apprehensive that it wouldn’t have made it to Columbus, Georgia, on the official release date — but sure enough there was a big display of Everything LPs, cassette tapes and CDs at the front of the chain record store. The elation I felt as I held the cassette in my hands and then paid for it indescribable. Is there any feeling greater than being a young music fan and the band you live for drops a new album?

As I listened to it on repeat that October, I loved Everything about as much as you would expect from a Bangles zealot. Several of its tracks became instant faves (“In Your Room,” “Watching the Sky” and “Glitter Years,” to name a few). It imprinted many feelings and impressions on my tender teenage mind, especially in its more melancholy passages. I was especially struck with how advanced, expansive and sometimes dark the songwriting was, and how the band had started moving beyond their characteristic devotion to the 60s to incorporate influences from the 70s (especially Bowie and Led Zep).

But I felt a certain reserve about it too. I wasn’t so sure about the more pop elements, and I felt it was over-produced. “Eternal Flame” in particular left me feeling puzzled and dismayed. I’d gone in hoping for an album full of the hard-edged, garage-rock punch of “Hazy Shade of Winter,” which had been a massive non-album hit for them just a few months before. Everything’s slickness and eclecticism left me wondering what could have been.

In other words, I had that same rockist attitude about the album that many fans still have. Ironically it was the Bangles themselves who were responsible for this. Under their influence, reading interviews with them about their favorite bands, that year I’d started exploring classic rock, punk and alternative, from the Velvet Underground to the Ramones to R.E.M. I’d become a snob about what rock and roll should sound like, a phase that every young music fan passes through when trying to break out of mainstream tastes (and some never get over!).

After the breakup of the Bangles a year later, during my first year of college, my tastes shifted again, and I went off in different musical directions, eventually becoming an underground club DJ (here’s my story about that time). A long, long time passed before I listened to Everything again.

I finally revisited it a couple of years ago, after I started excavating my Bangles fandom during COVID lockdown and my long-dormant passion for them exploded into my life again. Something unexpected happened: I found that of all the Bangles albums old and new, Everything was the one I was most drawn to, most fascinated by, most likely to compulsively play over and over. It’s fair to say I love it more now than when it was new. I’ve certainly listened to it more lately than I ever did in the 80s.

Everything is definitely a product of its time and place — sophisticated Southern California pop-rock with that sheen that’s particular to a major-label recording from the 80s. Its sound is lush, lavishly produced, and features many of the hallmarks of the era: synths, gated drums, big breakdowns, power ballads, tinges of new wave and glam metal, and guitar solos played by hired guns including Kiss’s Vinnie Vincent.

And I love all that! It’s an amazing sound and I wouldn’t trade it. The production is perfect for the material, just as the more stripped-down production of their earlier work was also perfect in context. There’s so much sonic creativity from one track to the next, and so much detail; it really rewards repeat listens. It feels like a greatest-hits album (an even better one than their actual Greatest Hits).

Time and distance have been very kind to Everything. From my outlook, it’s been vindicated by the increasingly meaningless boundary between pop and rock in contemporary music; and by the critical rehabilitation of other formerly undervalued women in pop including Stevie Nicks, Linda Ronstadt and Kate Bush.

Everything is very much in line with higher-quality late-80s top 40, and there’s no shame in that. Hoffs’ songwriting collaborators Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly had scored hits in the preceding years with all-time classic bangers including Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors,” Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional,” and Heart’s “Alone,” and that’s an indicator of the caliber of Everything more broadly.

On the other hand, with the band’s trusty Bangle-jangle still intact on many tracks and with all the wonderful psychedelic flourishes, Everything also fits in quite comfortably with the alternative rock of the era by the likes of Crowded House, Kate Bush, the Church, and the B-52’s. The way it bridges both of those worlds is one of my favorite things about it. It contains some of the Bangles’ hardest rockers alongside “Eternal Flame.” It contains multitudes.

What others see as disjointedness in the patchwork styles, I see as a strength. It’s surprisingly cohesive, bound by Sigerson’s production and especially by those exquisite harmonies. One of the miracles of the way the Bangles’ vocals work — trading leads, backing each other on harmonies — is that “your ear will focus on that other voice you heard sing lead on the track before,” as Hoffs once put it. That dynamic creates interesting subtexts in the “dialogues” between the lead and backing vocals (Chris O’Leary writes eloquently about this in his great history of the band at 64 Quartets), and it gives the band’s sound unity within diversity.

Despite being the work of four songwriters working in isolation, there are many images and motifs, even specific phrases that repeat themselves, hauntingly, across the different leads’ songs — watching someone while they sleep, complicated women, car crashes, suicide, nighttime phone calls to distant lovers, moonlight. The lunar motif is appropriate: in contrast to the sunny, summery sound of Different Light, the follow-up is a very lunar, autumnal album, with its pervasive themes of melancholy and alienation. Lesley Schiff’s ornate sleeve art embodies this mood, with its stark, high-contrast black-and-white image of the band looking pensive amidst verdant greenery — a subtle mood of high fantasy in a Stevie Nicks vein, as if they were elves in a Tolkien story.

Perhaps it’s too easy to make a connection between the alienated themes on the record and the real-life stress and turmoil the Bangles were going through. I don’t want to speculate about their personal lives too much, but I can’t help thinking about the band’s troubled history and impending breakup when I listen to it. It adds an emotional richness to the narrative; it seems to become part of the story.

Now on to the songs!

1. In Your Room (lead singer: Susanna Hoffs; songwriters: Hoffs, Tom Kelly, Billy Steinberg) — The opening track, also the first single, is a concise case for the greatness of Everything, and the greatness of the Bangles. It combines all the band’s strengths into an irresistible three-and-a-half-minute blast of pop, rock and psychedelia. Vicki Peterson’s opening refrain is typical of her guitar work: short, sharp, and instantly memorable. Her sister’s drumming is especially ace here — hard-hitting on the one hand (her jackhammer kick and snare on the middle eight an awesome callback to her almost industrial drumming on “Hazy Shade”) but also hella danceable, especially in tandem with Steele’s rubbery bassline. Rock and roll is dance music, after all, and “In Your Room” belongs in the canon of great party rock from the B-52s to Wet Leg. So many great details: the timpani, the organ stabs, the sitar solo, the cowbell!, and especially the outrageously cool climactic Mellotron — a real Mellotron, not a synth — which takes the whole thing to another level of psych-rock freakiness. Same with the spooky pitch-shifting backing harmonies.

Lyrically it’s an interesting departure: one of the few Bangles songs that’s so explicitly sexual. Hoffs says she wanted to write a “fun female empowered power pop song about sex.” She says it was inspired by George Michael; I suspect it also owes something to Madonna, who of course pioneered this kind of sexual empowerment in pop. That “In Your Room” was aimed right at young male fans my age (I’ll teach you everything that a boy should know), with Hoffs at once playfully acknowledging and satirizing our feelings about her (Gonna make your dreams come true), was thrilling but painful too. I remember self-consciously blushing every time I listened to it; it was just too on the nose. Hoffs’ vocal is a peak example of her ability to be vulnerable yet tough, with deceptive power — like when she barks Feel good! In your room!, expressing the euphoria and also the power of lust in the same way a male rock singer would, flipping the usual dynamic on its head.

I love Tamra Davis’s video: campy 60s pop psychedelia filtered through campy arch-80s kitchen-sink videomaking: the band all in white in a white room distorted by hand-painted pop-art squiggles, the band dressed like boys in a boy’s room, then go-go dancing in an acid-dream funhouse, then rocking out on a fake-forest set straight from The Dark Crystal. Sublime stuff.

2. Complicated Girl (lead vocal: Michael Steele; songwriters: Steele, David White) — After no lead vocals on All Over the Place, and two on Different Light (one a cover), Steele came into her own with three songs on Everything, each one brilliant, each one very different.

“Complicated Girl” might seem derivative at first: its chugging midtempo and baroque keyboards read like an effort to recapture the mojo of “Manic Monday.” The lyrical hook is admittedly a bit bland: Love is never simple with a complicated girl. But those objections quickly melt away as layer upon layer of melody washes over you. There’s nothing pedestrian about Steele’s vocal; her introspective, almost somber tone and clipped, Dylanesque phrasing contrast splendidly with the euphoric pop. Her bass playing is typically excellent too, with deft, melodic little fills; and I especially love Debbi Peterson’s expressive drum fills. Then the exquisite chorus. As the four-part harmonies rise and fall in intricate patterns on the words hey, ’cause, love, and complicated, I can almost feel the serotonin surging into my brain. The way the Bangles can turn a chorus from “ridiculously catchy” to “almost supernaturally overpowering” with those harmonies is what sets them apart from just about any other band. The backing Ooh la la’s on the bridge followed by the big breakdown give it the feel of a 60s girl-group anthem (an influence Hoffs also explores to great effect on this LP). Why don’t bands do these kinds of breakdowns anymore? Are they considered corny or melodramatic? To me it’s perfection. In another timeline that breakdown would’ve sounded so killer on the radio.

The narrator is a woman commenting on a male friend’s unrequited obsession with another woman — making it an interesting sequel to “If She Knew What She Wants.” Steele has said it was based on a friend’s real relationship problems. That cattiness is hilarious; but there’s a lot of depth here too: Someday she’ll find a way to remedy this lovely mess she’s made of you.

3. Bell Jar (lead singer: Vicki Peterson; songwriters: Vicki & Debbi Peterson) — When I listened to Everything for the first time in decades, it was “Bell Jar” that stopped me cold, three tracks in, and made me remember what a one-of-a-kind album it is. Off-kilter psychedelic rock that verges on goth with its eerie sound effects and themes of depression and suicide, based on the 1963 autobiographical novel by Sylvia Plath, it’s not the strongest Bangles song but it’s so admirably weird compared to the rest of their discography, or anyone’s.

The sound mix is unusually sparse, leaving plenty of room for whirring helicopter noise, electronic screams, and industrial clanging, illustrating the lyrical metaphor of being trapped in glass. As a fan of electronic music, this is why I miss the 80s, when even a retro-minded band like the Bangles would play around with experimental noise. In leading the melody, Steele’s bass vies with Peterson’s searing, minimalist guitar lines. Hoffs describes them as “grunge guitars,” but to me the sound is very postpunk. She says the backing vocals, with their spookily sustained high-pitched notes, were intended to sound like bells being struck.

The lyrics fascinated me as a kid, with their haunting portrait of a woman who suffocated living in a bell jar. I don’t think it’s meant to correlate directly with Plath’s life story. She dresses in black, cause sorrow is a magnet is a great, very goth line, but doesn’t really describe Plath. Is the song more broadly about being a woman in this society? Did Peterson identify with the novel’s depiction of alienation in a woman artist (She’s never alone but she’s oh so lonely)? That it’s open to interpretation is one reason it works so well, as does the sensitivity that accompanies the gloom: What is the crime in knowing your mind?

The song led me to read the novel, helping shape my young literary life as well as my budding feminism. The Bangles weren’t just important to me for their music: they influenced how I viewed cinema and literature as well as politics. I wanted to read the books they read and see the foreign films they talked about; I wanted to be as open-minded as they were.

4. Something to Believe In (lead singer: Steele; songwriters: Steele, Eric Lowen, Dan Navarro, White) — As a kid I was stunned by the maturity of this song, and Steele’s willingness to depart from anything resembling the usual Bangles sound, with its autumnal feel, its moody, chiming guitars and synths and gorgeous percussion by Paulhino da Costa. It still stuns me the way it builds to its soaring, yearning climax, like the sun breaking through autumn rainclouds on a remote beach. It seems obvious that Kate Bush was an influence here, along with other art-rockers of the era like Peter Gabriel and U2. It’s got a similar vibe to the atmospheric progressive rock of Bush’s The Sensual World LP (released the same week in October 1988), right down to the elemental symbolism in lines like Eyes the color of the ocean and I could feel the sun on my back. Though I have to admit that Can you hear winds of change? is a corny line — more like Mike and the Mechanics than something Bush would write. But otherwise I love the lyrics, which are so disarmingly vulnerable, matching the vulnerability of Steele’s vocal — it kills me when she calls herself a loser. Hoffs’ ghostly aside from the background (I turned around), a detail you might miss in the mix, speaks to the richness of the production.

To me, the moodiness of “Something to Believe In” goes hand in hand with desperately wishing that Steele, with her singular talents and songwriting voice, had been able (or allowed) to have a solo career. She’s been retired from the music industry and public life for 19 years, lending her fleeting contributions to the Bangles a melancholy mystique.

5. Eternal Flame (lead singer: Hoffs; songwriters: Hoffs, Kelly, Steinberg) — Ah, “Eternal Flame.” I guess I could write a whole article about this track. I understand why some fans can’t embrace it, because like I said that was me at first (though despite my misgivings I felt a hot glow of elation when it hit number one). The other three Bangles couldn’t embrace it either — they outvoted it when it was first proposed for inclusion on the album. Sigerson eventually talked them into it, but they were uncomfortable with the direction things were going.

In the band’s unusually honest, almost cathartic 2000 interview with Goldmine, Vicki Peterson says, “It was not a Bangles song,” and that she felt “completely emotionally divorced” from it. She says it was sold to her as something akin to Patsy Cline.

I think the memory of this rejection still stings for Hoffs — she mentions it often; she mentions it twice in this recent Vulture interview. As painful as it is hearing about these tensions, it’s not fair to say, as many do, that “Eternal Flame” is what derailed the band. Those tensions were there in the first place, and were largely caused by external forces. Some fans seem comfortable suggesting Hoffs is to blame for the Bangles’ demise and that’s unfair and problematic for a bunch of reasons.

I’m much more at peace with “Eternal Flame” now. In fact I actively love it. Hoffs was right: you don’t sit on a song this good. Her fierce pride in it is touching — she often talks about how much it means to her that people play it at weddings or sing it to their children. It’s also the Bangles song most likely to be embraced by diverse audiences: Black and LGBTQ+ folks, millennials and zoomers who weren’t even born when it hit number one. It’s a karaoke standard and there are endless cover versions. It’s one of the Bangles songs most embedded in popular consciousness, to the point that it’s basically a folk song. Instead of comparing it to Patsy Cline, perhaps the Carpenters or Dolly Parton would be a more accurate touchstone — and the increasing acceptance of those artists by rock fans offers insight into how we should look at “Eternal Flame.”

Stereogum critic Tom Breihan wrote a staunch defense of the greatness of “Eternal Flame” in his Number Ones column a couple of years ago. He rated it a rare 10 out of 10 and wrote:

From where I’m sitting, anyone who thinks that ‘Eternal Flame’ is a bad song is flat-out wrong. ‘Eternal Flame’ is a transcendent song. It’s magic and mystery and all-consuming need, all swept up into a devastating four-minute prom ballad. It sounds like space unfurling in front of your eyes. It’s overwhelming.

The video is a four-minute cinematic masterpiece of low light, chirascuro, and slow cross-dissolves that have the band members morphing into each other — both sensuous and strangely eerie. It was directed by Tim Pope, who directed most of the Cure’s videos — appropriate in light of Breihan’s assertion that “in its all-crushing drama, ‘Eternal Flame’ is almost gothic.”

6. Be with You (lead singer: Debbi Peterson; songwriters: Peterson, Walter Igleheart) — The third single is the only song on Everything and one of the few in the Bangles repertoire that I can say I don’t really like. Unlike other songs on the album, “Be with You” has never managed to grow on me. It’s a twofold disappointment: first, as quintessentially 80s pop-rock aimed at top 40 radio, it doesn’t really sound like the Bangles. It’s heavy on the synth strings and Vicki Peterson’s guitar is hardly a factor. That would have been fine if it was a better song — those things are also true of “Eternal Flame.” But it also doesn’t work on its own terms, with its dismayingly generic chorus and lyrics.

The circumstances around its release are unfortunate too. With her huge talent and stage presence, Debbi Peterson deserved a shot at the spotlight, especially after the raw deal she got from Kahne. But in the wake of “Eternal Flame,” “Be with You” only reached number 30, and this misfire sadly ended up being the last hurrah of the classic era. Even the video is a downer, with its halfhearted mix of real and faux live footage and its sexist focus on Hoffs’ butt (the opposite of the empowerment of “In Your Room”). With the sound down you’d be hard-pressed to figure out Peterson is the lead singer.

What about the good things? I like the Motown-inspired beat that’s reminiscent of the Cure’s “Why Can’t I Be You?” I have a fan theory that Debbi Peterson was listening to a lot of new wave at this time, because all three songs she co-wrote on Everything, including her sister’s “Bell Jar,” have at least a little bit of a new-wave feel. I actually like the strings, and the synth bass too. Peterson’s vocal is good; to her credit she puts her all into it. I can see what they were trying to do and it’s pleasant enough! But it just doesn’t do much for me.

The good news: the same songwriting team came up with an absolute banger on this very same album — see below.

7. Glitter Years (lead vocal: Steele; songwriters: Steele, White) — A bittersweet ode to the good times and excesses of the glam-rock era, “Glitter Years” is a brilliant pastiche of Ziggy Stardust and one of the most remarkable of all Bangles songs. It flips the script on the usual Bangles formula, from Debbi Peterson’s massive, stomping drum sound to her sister’s insanely catchy Mick Ronsonesque riffs to the fact that it’s one of the few Bangles songs to tell a story about a particular time and place.

In two short verses Steele paints a vivid picture of young people escaping unhappy homes and finding liberation in music, in rejecting social norms, and in each other. We were the lost and lonely ones / We hid in the discotheques all night long. Dig her nonchalant reference to gender-nonconforming glam fashion: Denny was king, he rocked the place / Dressed like a working girl from outer space. Somehow this is more controversial now than it was in 1988 or even 1973! The plaintive, almost mournful chorus undercuts the glowing nostalgia: I don’t really know how we survived the glitter years / What did we do it all for?

Steele’s great vocal captures that mixture of fond reminiscence and regret, even weariness. I love her full-throated YOW! that kicks off each verse (a nice reminder that she was a founding member of the Runaways) and her eerie interpolation of Bowie’s “Hang on to Yourself.” The morbid ending with a tragic car crash places it in a great line of pop and rock songs about reckless, doomed youth. Along with many Bangles fans I’ll always wonder what might have been if it had been a single. Like the Bangles, pop culture more broadly was just starting to become fixated on the 70s around this time. With its combination of nostalgia and kick-ass riffs, “Glitter Years” could have really taken off, especially if it had a colorful 70s-retro video to match. But there are so many what-ifs.

8. I’ll Set You Free (lead singer: Hoffs; writers: Hoffs, Lowen, Navarro) — This one has such an interesting shadow role in Bangles lore because it would have been the fourth single from Everything if the band hadn’t broken up. Listening now, it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t have been another big hit. “I’ll Set You Free” is just a devastating song, timeless jangle-pop perfection; beautifully written, produced, played and sung; with a wonderful 60s girl-group feel, another amazing big breakdown, and tinges of achy-breaky country (I’ve often said Hoffs could have been a great country singer). It should be considered one of the greatest songs of the 80s, but few outside the fandom even know it anymore.

If it had been the fourth single, it wouldn’t have been fair to the other bandmembers — especially since after “Be with You” fizzled, Columbia decided they would stick with Hoffs’ songs for all singles going forward. But how could a song this good go unreleased? How could one as good as “Glitter Years” go unreleased? That paradox demonstrates how great the Bangles were and what a painful situation they were in.

Hoffs is on fire here. In my review of her 2021 album Bright Lights, I wrote that Hoffs “was never a powerful singer, but she sings with character and confidence.” “I’ll Set You Free” shows I was wrong about the first bit: her vocal is so powerful on this track, so soulful and committed. It’s a fitting tribute to her girl-group inspirations including Ronnie Spector, whose influence is direct here, especially in Hoffs’ trilling, wavering cries on the fadeout. All the details: the gated drums, Steele’s warm bassline, the way the sitar adds a psychedelic edge, the backing harmonies and call-and-response echoes on the chorus. The lyrics: the way We work it out like business adds a hint of weary cynicism to the heartbreak. The imagery of I hear you through the wire / The words all sound like noise. And the chorus’s I remember words that fell like coins into a wishing well — a lovely, memorable line.

The fact that it’s about Hoffs telling someone she loves that it’s not working is especially heartbreaking when you imagine it context of the band’s breakup.

9. Watching the Sky (lead vocal: Vicki Peterson; songwriters: Peterson, Hoffs) — The thing about Vicki Peterson’s four songs on Everything is that, unlike those of her three partners, none of them sound at all calculated to be hits. It’s like she made up her mind to do whatever she felt like doing and the radio be damned. On “Watching the Sky” she felt like paying tribute to Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and her other 70s hard-rock influences, and the result is, like “Glitter Years,” a distinctive outlier. I love that it’s co-written by Hoffs, also a Zep fan though you don’t hear it as much in her own songs. “Watching the Sky” was big for me around the same time I was getting into metal-influenced alternative and grunge like Jane’s Addiction and Soundgarden; I used to put it on mixtapes with songs by those bands along with Beastie Boys tracks that sampled John Bonham’s drums. It held up next to them!

What all these bands showed is that rocking hard isn’t so much about screeching guitars as it is about the heavy groove. Debbi Peterson brings out that groove in her Bonham-inspired dinosaur stomp of a beat — the opening four bars by themselves a reminder of her tremendous skill. Steele’s rumbling bassline gives it that funky swing that so few of the glam-metal bands that dominated MTV in that era really understood. As it does on “In Your Room” the Mellotron adds a crazy amount of extra drama, and Peterson doesn’t try to compete with it on lead guitar. Her solo is one of the coolest I’ve ever heard: so low on the scale it sounds like a bass, more like an obsessively repeated riff than a proper solo. As she so often does, she makes her guitar sound like it’s singing back to her, trying to comfort her.

In contrast to grunge, “Watching the Sky” has a very clean sound, and that cleanness, and the spaciousness in the mix, adds weird tension. Peterson’s vocals sound like they’re echoing into emptiness, aptly illustrating the theme of loneliness and sexual longing in a small-town hotel. Love the cheeky suggestion of phone sex: Hanging on the telephone as if it were my friend. There are so many other great lines — Peterson, always the band’s best lyricist, comes up with some great imagery here: The black sky wraps around us / Like skin it keeps us whole. It’s possibly her best-ever vocal performance; her climactic, almost desperate howls always kill me.

10. Some Dreams Come True (lead singer: Debbi Peterson; songwriters: Peterson, Igleheart) — About the time this one hits is when I just can’t get over how many great songs are on this album. “Some Dreams Come True” didn’t grab me when I was young, but lately it’s become one of my favorite Bangles songs. It’s located somewhere between the psychedelic postpunk of the Church and and the atmospheric new wave of mid-80s Cure, with jangly guitar offset by a driving dance-rock rhythm augmented by tasty synths. The glide of this song is so exhilarating; it hardly ever breaks down between verse, chorus, and bridge, so that Peterson’s pulsating tempo on the drums leaves you breathless.

The piercingly melodic guitar solo, by the late Bobby Donati, reminds me so much of the solos that the Church’s Peter Koppes was playing around this time. The backing harmonies are exquisite, especially Steele’s monotone counterpoint to Peterson’s So close to you on the chorus. The bridge is one of the best moments in the entire Bangles discography, a dreamy minor-key interlude that seems like an explicit tribute to the Cure with its whirling synth strings and wistfully surreal capital-R Romantic lyrics (Moving in circles that we create / Seeing whatever we choose). That’s how I hear it anyway, because I’m an 80s kid; it’s possible Peterson wasn’t into the Cure at all and had older psychedelic or power-pop influences in mind. But let me have my fan theory.

11. Make a Play for Her Now (lead singer: Vicki Peterson; songwriters: Peterson, Vinnie Vincent) — This one can be compared to Fleetwood Mac in that it’s beautiful folk-rock with a driving rhythm, a sophisticated arrangement, and breathtakingly bitter lyrics.

Peterson, a truly great songwriter and initially the band’s most prolific (she wrote or co-wrote all the originals on All Over the Place), has hardly ever written a sappy love song. Most of the Bangles’ early material is about shady boyfriends and bad breakups, and that added a spiky feminist edge to their music. Peterson continued in that mode even as a more romantic mood became dominant in the group’s output. But “Make a Play for Her Now” makes “James” seem like kids’ stuff by comparison; she really went to a dark place here. It’s about a woman who’s given up caring whether her partner cheats or not. At some social gathering, she tells him with a combination of caustic sarcasm and exhausted resignation: Hey love, it’s all right, go on and Who am I to lay the blame when it’s all a game. She almost seems to savor her pain: I bleed so slow / You may never know. I don’t think I could even fathom this kind of bitterness when I was 17. Was adult romance really this cold and tired?

The juxtaposition of that bleak chill and the warm glowing beauty of the song itself — gorgeous 12-string by Vinnie Vincent (again reminding me of the Church), tasty backing keyboards, a hint of Latin percussion, the harmonies of course — make this one an underplayed gem.

12. Waiting for You (lead singer: Hoffs; songwriters: Hoffs, Kelly, Steinberg) — This one is ridiculous, because at this point you think the album is wrapping up and suddenly there’s another jangly midtempo Susanna Hoffs number that’s criminally underrated and totally destroys you, as if “I’ll Set You Free” wasn’t enough.

Like “Eternal Flame,” this one doesn’t have a chorus, but it’s so infectious it doesn’t need one — the whole song is like one long chorus. Hoffs says these kinds of unusual structures in the songs she co-wrote with Kelly and Steinberg were inspired by the Beatles. Well, something clicked because this song is worthy of the damn Beatles.

Because of the unfortunate focus on Hoffs in the media, some Bangles fans have made an overcorrection and try to downplay her inarguably massive talent. The result is that from time to time you actually have to make a case for the genius of Susanna Lee Hoffs — you have to actually defend her contribution to the band’s legacy. Which is nuts, because it should speak for itself!

Anyway, that’s a thought I often have as this song hits me hard and makes me stare into space for three and a half minutes.

The false ending is so great! It gets me each time. And then, after the gated drums kick back in with delicious drama, it’s followed by one of Vicki Peterson’s prettiest solos — again, like a voice singing back to Hoffs, as the long fadeout (the real end this time) feels like the sun going down on the Bangles’ classic era.

13. Crash and Burn (lead vocal: Vicki Peterson; songwriters: Peterson, Rachel Sweet) — The last track is such a fascinating way to end that classic period: after an album of tangents, a return to the garage rock that was their wheelhouse. But though “Crash and Burn” is an old-fashioned party-rocking rave-up with a pounding rhythm, clanging guitars, and comical hepcat lines like L.A. to Reno, checkin’ out the scene-oh, the fact remains that it’s about suicide — Peterson’s second on that topic on this album. However in contrast to the goth mood of “Bell Jar,” the narrator of this one sounds extremely psyched, playful even, to be speeding without headlights on a desert highway at night (Going nowhere, and I don’t care, can’t wait till I get there) and contemplating the sweet release of death, wishing to become nothing more an oily stain on the blacktop (And by tomorrow they’ll sweep the char-oh, and wash the tar and trouble away). It’s like this fiery demise is a just another party; it’s so weird and funny it’s worthy of Spinal Tap. I always crack up at the backup vocalists’ ambulance sounds: Weee-oooh weee-ooh! This comedy factor keeps me from wanting to speculate too much on what Peterson may have been going through as she fantasized getting away from it all in such a fashion (Gotta be a place where they can’t find me).

Best of all is the way the song ends mid-line, Peterson stopping abruptly with How I wish I would — without completing the “crash and burn” part, a final crashing drum fill and quickly fading reverb serving as an aural metaphor for the narrator’s presumably final doom. And, with absurd poignancy, by chance also the last thing Bangles fans would hear of the band for many years to come. How I wish I would

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