Happy 30th Anniversary to Mazzy Star’s second studio album So Tonight That I Might See, originally released October 5, 1993.
Hope Sandoval is so notoriously reclusive from the spotlight that the bio on her website issues a philosophical statement, or a warning: “Hope is a very shy and private person.” She then includes a quote from herself, possibly from an old interview: “Once you're onstage, you're expected to perform. I don't do that. I always feel awkward about just standing there and not speaking to the audience. It's difficult for me." Her musical partner David Roback, who died in 2020, was equally introverted and reserved. “There was a side to him that was very mysterious in certain ways,” remembered The Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs in a Los Angeles Times obituary.
Together, the Mazzy Star duo was so quiet, limelight-shunning, and standoffish that every rare interview always seems to mention their long awkward silences, elusive maneuvering around questions, and just a general, palpable, obvious desire not to be there. Even their poker-faced demeanors during live shows became notorious. During one early concert, the Guardian notes, the audience became so frustrated that they started shouting, “Talk to us!” Later on, my friend Kara, a flight attendant, caught Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions during their 2002 tour in a couple of far-flung cities, and when she breezed back into our Brooklyn apartment in her pressed uniform with her roll-y suitcase, she reported that Sandoval was so painfully demure that she’d felt guilty taking photos on the little digital camera she’d snuck into the club in her underwear (as one did in those days).
“They’re not your normal rock ‘n’ roll people,” mused Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis, who distributed Mazzy Star’s 1990 debut She Hangs Brightly. “I think they really do live in their own worlds. It’s a very typical musician thing in a way, in that they’re so obsessed with music and doing what they do, that it kind of removes them slightly from normal social mores.”
So you can be forgiven for escaping the ’90s knowing everything about Kurt Cobain or R.E.M. or Tori Amos or Garbage, and virtually nothing about Mazzy Star. Even if you were among the first to buy 1993’s So Tonight That I Might See, and even if you didn’t do that, if “Fade Into You” has been burned into your brain via every angsty-romantic scene in every movie or TV show over the past three decades. (Vulture speculated in 2013 that it might be one of the most overused songs in film and TV. And last year, according to Entertainment Weekly, “Fade Into You” made a “comeback” rivaling Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” by appearing in hit series like Yellowjackets, Virgin River, and Dopesick.)
To get to the beginning of Mazzy Star, though, you have to rewind the tape back past the ’90s to early-’80s Los Angeles where a scene called the Paisley Underground was emerging in the background of the much louder, much more famous hair metal scene taking over the Sunset Strip. A mix of ’60s psychedelia (think Love and the Byrds), a Velvet Underground-influenced drone, and even a little bit of Beatles-style sunny pop, the Paisley Underground was out of step with everything slick and synthetic and ’80s. The bands liked the sound of vintage instruments—Rickenbackers and organs and Gretschs—and a general gauzy and velvety trippy-ness.
David Roback, a California native, first met guitarist Matt Piucci while attending artsy Carleton College in Minnesota. They’d each been assigned roommates with whom they’d clashed, and so they were reassigned to each other. “I walk into this guy’s room and I see the huge Jimi Hendrix poster and the American flag and he’s playing the Doors,” Piucci recalled. “I’m like, ‘OK, we’re going to get along.” Still, the Minnesota snow may have gotten to them, because they both left Carleton before graduation. Roback transferred to UC Berkley, where he formed a romantic relationship with his childhood friend Susanna Hoffs, who was living in a groovy, looming Victorian house while also attending the university. They started a band with Roback’s brother Steve called the Unconscious. The band and the romance didn’t last, but Roback and Hoffs would remain life-long friends.
In the Spring of ’81, Roback and his former Minnesota roommate Matt Piucci reconnected in Los Angeles in hopes of forming a band, which they christened Sidewalk before settling on Rain Parade, matching the dark, introspective vibe of their music. Rain Parade soon became part of a loose network of bands who shared their sensibilities—the Dream Syndicate, Green On Red, the Salvation Army and, probably the most famous band to emerge from the Paisley Underground scene, Susanna Hoffs’ The Bangs (later the Bangles).
After releasing one single and an album with Rain Parade, Roback drifted away to devote his attention to another band called Clay Allison with former Dream Syndicate singer and now-girlfriend Kendra Smith. The couple had initially started the floaty psych-folk band as a side project, playing their inaugural gig in New York at the Pyramid Club after Rain Parade had played CBGBs. Clay Allison eventually morphed into Opal, inspired by the Syd Barrett song (and same-named album) “Opel.” Opal never sold a lot of records—they released two EPs and an album, Happy Nightmare Baby—but the band managed to gain influential attention through fanzines and its label SST.
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Maybe most importantly, though, Opal attracted the attention of a teenager named Hope Sandoval, who lived in the Spanish-speaking Maravilla neighborhood of East LA and had become a fan of Kendra Smith’s while she was still in the Dream Syndicate. Sandoval was often a fixture at Dream Syndicate soundchecks. “Her mom would bring her,” recalls Dream Syndicate frontman Steve Wynn. “She couldn’t come to our shows because she was too young. We talked to her and she seemed nice, but I got the feeling that she was particularly mesmerized by Kendra. The beginning of the All About Eve saga!”
He's referring to the fact that Sandoval would eventually replace Smith in Opal in the middle of their 1987 tour with the Jesus and Mary Chain. But the way Sandoval describes it, there was nothing underhanded or conniving about it, as Wynn’s movie reference might suggest. “What do I think connected us? We liked each other’s music,” she said. “That’s really what it was. We didn’t really communicate a lot other than just enjoying each other’s music.”
Sandoval had already been making music as part of a folk duo called Going Home with her friend Sylvia Gomez, and she connected with Roback and Smith (even handing the latter a demo) over their shared love of similar sounds. Eventually, Smith got tired of being Opal’s frontperson (Smith is also rumored to be reclusive and has kept a very low profile over the years), and so at Roback’s request, Sandoval flew to New York to help finish out the tour.
In 1988, after continuing with Opal material for a while, Roback and Sandoval decided to launch something different and Mazzy Star was born. They released their debut She Hangs Brightly in 1990 to moderate fanfare and acclaim and toured with the Cocteau Twins. Then, the American branch of Rough Trade shuttered, leaving the band temporarily without a label until they were picked up by Capitol, which released So Tonight That I Might See. “Fade Into You” became the album’s unexpected hit, peaking at No. 44 on the Billboard Hot 100.
“Fade Into You” is such a violet-blue song, a slow steady rainfall in winter, that after listening to it for months on end I was surprised when I finally saw the video (while visiting my dad in freezing Minneapolis over Christmas after he and my mom separated) and there was Hope Sandoval standing solemnly in the sun-bleached desert. Sandoval became a low-key ’90s It Girl alongside brazen Courtney Love and panda-eyed Shirley Manson all because in that video she made introversion look so regal and cool. And although she was in her twenties, she still looked like one of us, a teenager, a slip of a thing in a suede coat and a plaid skirt and sunglasses. I was an outgoing kid, and reasonably popular, but I also felt like I had a vast, quiet universe of reserve inside of me that I shared with no one (I think a lot of teenagers feel this way), and Sandoval’s sad, hypnotic voice reached gently into that space.
While “Fade Into You” shimmers with modern, now-timeless dream-pop, on “Bells Ring” the pulse of the Paisley Underground’s ’60s influence is strong with rock ‘n’ roll-tinged guitar and patient tambourine (although fuzzy grunge flirts at its edges). Sandoval’s voice takes on a slight country twang and then the guitar morphs into an introspective, luminescent wail. Like many of Mazzy Star’s songs, it’s a steady drone on top of intricate structure, with subtlety in its soft-focus details. “Mary of Silence” opens like a Doors song—“The End” immediately comes to mind—and it stays there without building into the eventual cacophony of its inspiration, offering uninterrupted meditation. (Obviously making it a good song to get stoned to.)
Mellow fingerpicking introduces the folky “Five String Serenade,” a cover of a song penned by Arthur Lee of the band Love, and it showcases Sandoval’s serene croon as its star. Rain falls and the narrator mourns an absent lover as she paints a watercolor portrait of her melancholy— “And on my easel I drew / While I was thinking of you / And on the roof of my head / In came my five-string serenade.”
“Blue Light” is an organ-infused waltz that harkens back to the innocent ’50s as the narrator sits in her room, thinking of someone else in his room. “There’s a blue light in my best friend’s room / There’s a blue light in his eye / There’s a blue light, yeah / I wanna see it shine.” It’s the kind of song that would fit well in a David Lynch film—a song for a girl in a sweater to sway to with eyes half closed—full of bygone-era nostalgia and wailing, bluesy guitar, breaking up the rest of the album’s dark, late-’60s vibe. “She’s My Baby,” in contrast, is a sexy, slowly swaggering jangle that evokes dusty velvet and snaking smoke plumes between rhythmic drumbeats.
“Unreflected” is another folky number, probably the most Byrds of the bunch, with rhythmic guitar, little percussion flourishes, and trippy, philosophical lyrics—“The unreflected feeling / Of a shortened flattened soul / The life that cuts cold.” The next track, “Wasted,” opens with Hendrix-reminiscent guitar and then chugs along unhurried as Sandoval sings the shivering blues.
“Into Dust” is bell-like in its methodical fingerpicking (we’ll hear reflections of it later in 1996’s “Rhymes of an Hour”), as Sandoval contemplates mortality and the inevitability of falling into dust and decay. While she studies death, she seems to address a higher being—“I could possibly be fading / Or have something more to gain / I could feel myself growing colder / I could feel myself under your fate.”
The final song “So Tonight That I Might See” brings out all the hippie bells and whistles and wails. It’s a dark Velvet Underground-style dirge with tambourines and incense whispers and Morrison-esque poetry that conjures up the dead put to rest in the previous song. “Come up, crash with the muses, fells dust and ash / Come so close I might see the light inside you that I didn’t see,” Sandoval sings in her séance. The song lasts a full seven minutes, and if you weren’t stoned before, you should be feeling the effects right now just as the guitar begins its keening, electric mourn. Sunshine on a rainy day, sunshine on a rainy day, sunshine on a rainy day.
As Gen X begins to contend with the sounds of its music reflected in Gen Z’s, I now listen to So Tonight That I Might See and wonder if it ever truly was our own. At the time it seemed so ’90s, a backdrop to nights doing homework in my bedroom, or smoking at lunchtime on a rainy day with Josh and Leah in my car. But after decades of it soundtracking hundreds of movie scenes—not to mention its ’60s-in-the-’80s origins—it more fittingly belongs to the coming-of-age of my parents, to my own teenage years, to the kids watching Yellowjackets today, and to a surreal sun-bleached desert bending far outside of space and time.
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