FEATURE:
Groovelines
The Bangles – Eternal Flame
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THERE is a good reason…
IN THIS PHOTO: Susanna Hoffs
why I am spotlighting the amazing Eternal Flame by The Bangles. Not only is it a song very dear to me. One of its writers, and a member of The Bangles, Susanna Hoffs, celebrates her sixty-fifth birthday on 17th January. One of my favourite artists, I wanted to salute her. Go deep with an amazing song. Released on 23rd January, 1989, Eternal Flame soon celebrates its thirty-fifth anniversary. That is the U.K. release at least, as the song started at eighty-one in the singles chart of 29th January to 4th February, 1989. It is a song that is very important to me. One I remember coming out and blowing me away. From the arresting, beautiful and emotional vocal from Susanna Hoffs, through to the video – one that I saw played on VH1 back in the day -, it a thing of wonder. Taken from The Bangles’ 1988 album, Everything, Eternal Flame was the second single from it (after In Your Room). Like In Your Room, Eternal Flame was written by Susanna Hoffs, Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg. A number one in the U.S. and U.K., Eternal Flame is one of the best-loved songs from The Bangles. The group, Susanna Hoffs, Vicki Peterson, Michael Steele and Debbi Peterson delivered the song with such purity and power. A track that is still lodged in my head nearly thirty-five years after its release. I will come to an article that goes deep inside Eternal Flame. I know there was a feeling within the band that, because Hoffs had the lead vocal on this song and In Your Room, she was being placed at the front – their lead and central focus. I don’t think that was ever true. A case of two songs where she was lead chosen as singles. I hope Susanna Hoffs – who will probably not get to read this – doesn’t mind me celebrating a song that maybe contributed to the break-up of The Bangles. The group did part ways in 1989., yet they re-formed in 1999 and released albums in 2003 and 2011.
IN THIS PHOTO: The Bangles from left, Vicki Peterson, Susanna Hoffs, Debbi Peterson, Michael Steele in 1988/PHOTO CREDIT: Dpa Picture Alliance/Alamy
In 2021, Susanna Hoffs and co-writer Billy Steinberg explained how they made Eternal Flame. The Guardian got the lowdown on one of the classic tracks of the 1980s. A story I thought was a myth when I was younger – regarding Susanna Hoffs being naked in the studio when recording her vocal – turned out to be true. It was a weird and wonderful time for The Bangles. With songs like this in their locker, there was also a sense of tension and exhaustion:
“Susanna Hoffs, singer, guitarist, co-writer
In 1988, it felt like the Bangles had been touring endlessly. Our second album, Different Light, with the singles Manic Monday and Walk Like an Egyptian, had been released two years earlier. Now, finally, we could take a break from living on buses together.
I began collaborating with the songwriting team Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, who wrote Like a Virgin and True Colors. Writing, for me, had always meant picking up a guitar and crafting a melody; the lyrics would emerge after I felt the emotion of the song. But Billy and Tom would always start with a lyric.
I went over to Billy’s house and was telling him about a Bangles trip to Graceland, in Memphis. When we got to Elvis’s grave, we started recreating Spinal Tap singing Heartbreak Hotel there when we noticed that the eternal flame by the grave was out because it was raining. Billy said: “Wait, eternal flame? That is a great name for a song.” Within about an hour we had the lyrics.
The song is about connection, hope and what we hold most dear. There’s a yearning in it, from the awareness that not everything is eternal, but we don’t want love to seem fragile; we want to depend on it.
When we made the demo at Tom’s studio, we recorded what we instinctively felt should have been a keyboard part, the little tick tock running through the song, on guitar. This was because the Bangles didn’t have a keyboard player. It was Vicki Peterson and me on guitar, Michael Steele on bass and Debbi Peterson on drums. Nevertheless, my enthusiasm and excitement about the song were so great that I carried the demo cassette around in my bag and would play it for anyone willing to listen.
Cut to the tense moment the band sat down with our producer, Davitt Sigerson, to vote which songs would be on the next album, Everything. Eternal Flame was rejected and I was heartbroken, but in the Bangles everybody played and sang and was represented creatively.
Once recording the album was under way, Davitt said: “I keep thinking about Eternal Flame and I know this wonderful keyboard arranger. Let’s go over to his studio and mess around.” When the band heard the result, they decided to go along for the journey.
Davitt had recently produced Olivia Newton-John and pranked me by telling me she did her best vocals in the nude. I imagined it would feel like skinny dipping –vulnerable yet freeing – and I decided to try it. Nobody could see me; there was a baffle in front of me and it was dark. After the first song went so well, I became superstitious about it, like in sports where you have to have your rabbit’s foot, and ended up compelled to skinny dip my way through most of the album, including Eternal Flame.
In 1988, it was the beginning of the end for the Bangles. We’d spent our 20s together, starting as a powerpop, garage-rock, local club band and eventually releasing three albums with Columbia records. After Everything was released, we went off to create our own music in different ways. But we have come back together to tour since, and that same bond is still there between us. It’s an eternal flame!
Billy Steinberg, songwriter
When Susanna told me about the eternal flame for Elvis at Graceland, it made me recall a childhood memory. My family was not very religious but my parents did send me to Sunday school. It was quiet and dark in the synagogue and there was a little red bulb they used to call the eternal flame. I immediately took out a notebook and free associated to the title.
When Tom and I wrote the songs True Colors, Like a Virgin and Alone, we had to make demos and then try to find a record company executive who thought they would be good for one of their artists. We were really lucky because Cyndi Lauper, Madonna and Heart sang the songs beautifully. But it was nothing like when you’re in a room with Chrissie Hynde or Susanna Hoffs, hearing one of those great pop singers sing the song as you create it. It’s so much less arduous and a great inspiration.
Eternal Flame was retro in that it has no chorus. It is structured like an old Beatles song, with the title tagged on to the end of the verse: “Am I only dreaming / Or is this burning an eternal flame?” The Beatles do a similar kind of thing on We Can Work It Out. Instead of choruses, both songs have two bridges (or middle eights). In We Can Work It Out, the bridge is the part that starts, “Life is very short / And there’s no time…” And in Eternal Flame it begins, “Say my name / Sun shines through the rain…” In the 60s, it wasn’t that unusual to have songs structured in that way, but, by the 80s, choruses were much more developed and middle eights had started to disappear.
The enduring popularity of the song is very gratifying. Some songs are hits and then they vanish, and some songs remain evergreen. I think Eternal Flame has that status”.
I love the bones of Eternal Flame. It is a magnificent song that Susanna Hoffs has performed quite a few times live through the years. One she feels an attachment to, I wanted to tie it into her sixty-fifth birthday celebration. An eternal goddess, let’s hope we get a special version of this very soon. I melt every time I hear her sing it! Also in 2021, Stereogum highlighted Eternal Flame for their feature, The Number Ones:
“Eternal Flame” does not sound much like a Bangles song. By the time they recorded 1988’s Everything, their third album, the Bangles had carved out a reliable chart presence with a very specific sound, a jangly and garage-y and consistently upbeat take on harmony-heavy ’60s folk-rock. With that sound, the Bangles had broken through in a huge way. The band’s 1986 single “Walk Like An Egyptian” had spent a month at #1, and Billboard had eventually named it the biggest song of 1987. “Walk Like An Egyptian” also kicks ass. So do the Bangles’ other hits. So when the Bangles came out with “Eternal Flame,” a #1 hit that completely diverged from their established sound, a whole lot of people — some of whom may have been actual Bangles — felt like the song was bad. These people were wrong.
In the late ’80s, the songwriting team of Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly went on a ridiculous run, cranking out a series of #1 hits that also happen to be bangers: Madonna’s “Like A Virgin,” Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors,” Heart’s “Alone,” Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional.” Steinberg was a Bangles fan, and he went to see the band at the Palace in Hollywood. There, he met Susanna Hoffs. Hoffs and Steinberg were both fans and scholars of ’60s pop, and they made plans to write some songs together. One of those songs was “I Need A Disguise,” which Belinda Carlisle recorded for her 1986 solo debut Belinda. That’s a pretty good start.
At one of their songwriting sessions, Hoffs told Steinberg and Kelly a story about when the Bangles had gone to visit Graceland while touring through Memphis. At Graceland, there was an outdoor shrine to Elvis with what was supposed to be an eternal flame. The day they visited, though, it was raining, so the eternal flame was out. Steinberg immediately suggested that “Eternal Flame” would be a great song title. As a kid in Palm Springs, he’d gone to a synagogue that had an eternal flame of its own. In Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book Of Number 1 Hits, a book that I cite in pretty much every column these days, Steinberg says, “There was a little red light — like a little red Christmas light — that they called the eternal flame. I remember thinking that there was this flame that could burn forever. It seemed very mysterious. It was like thinking about how far the universe goes, those little things that kids think about that blow their minds.”
Hoffs and Steinberg wrote the “Eternal Flame” lyrics together quickly, and Steinberg loves pointing out that the song has no chorus. (The “say my name, sun shines through the rain” bit is technically a middle eight.) Hoffs and Steinberg wanted “Eternal Flame” to sound like a track from the ’60s, when pop songwriting often had a less rigid set of rules. (Steinberg: “For us, ‘Eternal Flame’ was the Beatles meet the Byrds.”) Kelly arranged the music, and he and Hoffs recorded a demo together. They knew that “Eternal Flame” would sound better with a piano, but they used guitar on the demo instead, since the Bangles didn’t have a keyboard player. Hoffs sang lead on the demo, and Kelly sang the backup harmonies.
“Eternal Flame” is a love song, of course. But what’s striking about it is how uncertain — how fearful — Susanna Hoffs sounds. She’s head over heels for somebody, but she can’t luxuriate in her own happiness because she’s too consumed with the idea that this love is a fleeting thing. When she goes over everything in her mind, a future without this person becomes a horrifying possibility: “A whole life, so lonely, and then come and ease the pain/ I don’t wanna lose this feeling.”
Those “Eternal Flame” lyrics aren’t statements. They’re questions. Do you understand? Do you feel the same? Am I only dreaming? Or is this burning an eternal flame? It’s hard to imagine Hoffs’ narrator actually asking these questions. Instead, “Eternal Flame” sounds, to me, more like an internal monologue. Hoffs doesn’t really want to tell this person that she watches them when they’re sleeping. Instead, these terrible worries well up within her, and they stay there.
Hoffs’ phrasing on “Eternal Flame” just kills me. She wails the everloving fuck out of the song, but there’s no conviction in her delivery. Instead, her voice cracks and quavers. She’s in anguish. The arrangement answers that anguish back. It’s vast and majestic — strings, synths, pianos, kettle drums. (In the video, each new crescendo triggers a firework explosion or a crashing wave. I love that shit.) The other Bangles, harmonizing behind Hoffs, sound dispassionate and ethereal, like ghosts. They can’t soothe her narrator. All they can do is echo her questions back at her and offer ahhhs that at least come off vaguely sympathetic. In its all-crushing drama, “Eternal Flame” is almost gothic. The song offers Hoffs’ narrator no real comfort. When “Eternal Flame” ends, her questions are still open. She still doesn’t know if this flame is eternal”.
A stunning song that has passion and trepidation in the vocal. This sensed of yearning (and burning) that also has caution and fear. A fascinating song co-written and sung by Susanna Hoffs. She is sixty-five on 17th January…so I wanted to use this opportunity to wish her a happy birthday. Also show my love for one of my favourite songs ever. It is so stirring that it does something to me every time I hear it. When it comes to this song and its white-hot flame, it is something that can…
NEVER extinguish.