As she releases a brutally honest memoir, the new wave icon opens up about industry sexism, living with bipolar disorder and becoming ‘the world’s first atheist ordained minister’
The first thing Jane Wiedlin tells me before our interview even begins is that, an hour or so earlier, she downed two beers. “It keeps me cheerful,” she says with a laugh. The disclosure dovetails with the reason we’re doing the interview in the first place, which is to unpack her new memoir, a tome that deserves a truth-in-advertising award for its title alone: TMI (as in “too much information”). “I’ve always been TMI!” Wiedlin proudly announces. “I’m the one who always wanted to expose the truth. This book is my first opportunity to do so.”
A portion of that truth has to do with the band she helped form in the late 70s, the Go-Go’s. The five-piece are not only the first all-female band who play their own instruments and write their own material to earn a No 1 album in the US but, astonishingly, are the only such group to hold that distinction nearly 45 years later. The group’s power-pop music, heard in zippy hits like Our Lips Are Sealed and Vacation, led to their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021, inspired a Broadway play and influenced modern female artists all the way from Olivia Rodrigo to Wet Leg.
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