Mazzy Star was responsible for the early 90’s sleeper hit Fade Into You.
Featuring David Roback, who wrote most of the band’s music,
he was a talented multi-instrumentalist. He was joined by singer Hope Sandoval
who wrote most of the band’s lyrics, the breathy vocalist with a haunting yet hopeful voice.
Their hit track was released on the band’s 1993 sophomore album “So Tonight That I Might See.”
There was something pure about the band’s sound and their recording process.
In a 2020 interview with Refinery 29, Sandoval said:
"I like to hang out in restaurants and cafés, eavesdrop on people's conversations
and collect new stories. Then I go home and spend the evenings embellishing them."
Part of the band’s magic came from the soulmate-like connection between Roback
and Sandoval. In a 2018 interview with Double J, Sandoval said that and i quote:
"Half the time we don’t even really need to speak to each other, we use telepathy." The pair was
rumored to briefly be a couple around the time of recording their debut album, “She Hangs Brightly.”
The song Fade Into You became an anthem for lovelorn teenagers in the 90’s & Hollywood
loved it too. The song was licensed to more than 30 movies and television shows & had
artists like Ben Harper, Kelly Clarkson and Dinosaur Jr have all covered the song.
But before Roback became a musician he found himself in New York in the late 70’s
wanting to become a painter telling the LA Times in 1990 “I went to New York mainly to be part of
the art scene,”“But I gradually found myself getting more inspired by what was happening in
music than in art. . . . People like Patti Smith and Television. I felt like a punk.
That's the attitude I Iidentifid with, but when I picked up the guitar and started playing it,
the music didn’t come out sounding punk. It was something else. . . ..”
After brief stint in new york he would head back to Los Angeles.
Roback and Sandoval both started off in other bands before coming together to start Mazzy Star.
Roback went to UC Berkeley and started his band with his brother Steven called Unconscious with
Susanna Hoffs, who would later be known for co-founding The Bangles. The two brothers
started their next band, Rain Parade, in 1982, and they gained popularity in the L.A. indie scene.
The soft spoken Sandoval came from East LA where her parents worked in factory
and she was the youngest of ten children. She would form the group Going Home
while she was still in high school with frien d Sylvia Gomez in the early 80’s.
Both women were big fans of Rain Parade, & they decided to make a bold move to get on their radar.
After a 1983 Rain Parade concert, Gomez snuck backstage to give David Roback a demo tape. At
the time, Roback was under contract with Rough Trade records and Going Home was still unsigned,
but doing gigs around LA. Upon hearing the demo,
Roback offered to produce Going Home’s first album and play guitar on the record,
but even to this day it has yet to be released.. It was also around this time that Roback left Rain
Parade and Los Angeles and retreated to Berkley not feeling a connection to the LA music scene.
Roback briefly joined a musical collective called Rainy Day, and then went on to form
his third band Clay Allison later renamed themselves Opal. He would later be joined
by vocalist Kendra Smith & together they released 1987’s Happy Nightmare Baby,
but she departed the band during their tour with the group The Jesus and Mary Chain.
Roback was mid way through a two record deal with Rough Trade,
so Sandoval took over Smith’s place on vocals.
Dave and Hope toured as Opal for two years, and worked on the planned second album for Rough Trade
called Ghost Highway, but they ended up scrapping the material. Sandoval was unhappy with the
quality of music that the pair came up with and wanted to start fresh, so they formed a
new group called Mazzy Star and headed to Hyde Studios ,where they recorded 7 new tracks..
These tracks became the basis for Mazzy Star’s debut record,, 1990’s She Hangs Brightly. The
album landed them a spot on Billboard’s alternative songs charts, with their cover
of the Slapp Happy song Blue Flower, which would peak at number 29 o. Sandoval’s first bandmate
Sylvia Gomez also penned the song “Give You My Lovin.” Not only that but the album would be one
of the strongest debut records of 1990 making the Top 10 on the CMJ New Music Report survey
of college and alternative-rock radio station play lists & Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain even listed
the album as his top 50 favorite records. The album still made a mark as four years
later when Fade Into You hit it big the track Halah charted on the alternative song charts.
The band’s sound seemed to be heavily influenced by the Paisley Underground,
which was a California vocal movement that combined psychedelic sounds with rich vocals,
and they were influenced by 60’s groups like “Love” and “The Byrds.” The band also drew
many comparisons to the group Cowboy Junkies, more specifically their double platinum 1988
album The Trinity Season. But Roback pushed back against these comparisons telling the LA Times
“I’ve never even heard the Cowboy Junkies record,” “But then,
I don’t listen to a lot of contemporary music. I kind of purposely try to avoid
it because I don’t want to be influenced by it. I prefer the Rip Van Winkle approach to art.”
In a 1990 interview with the L.A. Times, Sandoval also shunned folk music as an
influence, instead confessing that she’s a fan of the Rolling Stones
revealing that she heard the track “Love in Vain” on a live Stones album and loved
it ever since. It would be the Stones keith richards who convinced her to pickup guitar.
When it came time to promoting the band’s work, Roback did 90% of the talking as
Sandoval was very reserved not talking much about her own personal life or lyrical themes.
Roback would tell the Times about Sandoval “I think Hope deserves a lot of attention,”
I think she is a great singer and a great songwriter. When I first heard her, I though
she could be someone like Bob Dylan, someone who could speak for a lot of people her age.”
“I see a lot of hope in her songs,” he said. “It’s
like that movie . . . ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.’ Something nice can come
out of a very caustic environment. . . . Something that tells you all isn’t lost.”
Soon after the release of the group’s debut album, the US branch of Rough Trade records folded,
and the band was quickly picked up by Capitol. They spend the next couple of years working on
the material that was to become their sophomore hit album “So Tonight That I Might See.”
The album would produce the band’s biggest hit “Fade Into You,” but it may surprise you to know
that many people have misinterpreted the song and the pair never anticipated the track to be
such a big hit. The dreamy song whose lyrics talk about heartache and longing accompanied
by piano and slide guitar is not actually a nostalgic song. Roback would tell Australia News
“It was never intended to be a nostalgic song. Unless you were meant to think about
nostalgia for the present because it really was about the present,
We used to walk on the beach a lot and walk around the city, “It came almost at the same time. We
weren’t trying to write a hit song — we were just writing a song.” & according to Roback in the
same interview the music came together pretty quickly with the pair writing the song in one
day."Fade Into You" would push So Tonight I might see to go platinum selling over 1 million copies
and the track would peak at number 3 on the modern rock charts in america.
It would also had crossover appeal waking at number 44 on the hot 100 charts.
So, what happened to the band after their second record? Well, The group still was kept
in the public eye. In addition to touring and television appearances, their label landed
the band some high profile slots appearing in the films batman forever and stealing beauty.
As the band’s label saw it, these two films kept the band in the public eye while book ending their
demographic with Batman forever appealing to the college crowd while stealing beauty
appealed to the baby boomers. In 1996, Mazzy Star released their highly anticipated follow up “Among
My Swan.” Upon releasing album, Among My Swan Capitol Records head of marketing Clark Staub
spoke to billboard magazine and discussed how Mazzy Star’s demographic crossed generations
telling the publication “you’re not just selling to 14 year olds and you’re not just selling to 35
year olds.” in the same interview Staub pointed to the band’s favorable press coverage with NPR,
People and Time Magazine and surprisingly Martha Stewart Living which included the
group’s sophomore record as one of the best albums to play during a dinner party.
Staub would say with a laugh “we didn’t ask for that.” To help promote the album the label
held a contest among retail outlets based on play counts of the album and in store sales
with the winning store would get their own personal Mazzy Star concert.
Among My Swan would be a commercial disappointment for Capitol Records Peaking at No. 68 on the
billboard album charts and it would sell less than a ¼ of it’s predecessor. It was during this
Sandoval reportedly "begged" the band’s label to be released from their contract revealing to
About.com in 2011, "It seemed record companies wanted bands to be creative because they didn't
know how to manufacture underground music. We could do our own thing and go at our own
pace. But that changed when major labels started wanting bands that would sell 7 million records.
They had a formula. And suddenly all these people wanted to come to the studio to keep
track of what we were doing and make sure we were following that formula. So we got out.”
The band stopped releasing music publicly for almost 13 years
and the group went on a temporary hiatus. Sandoval continued to work with Roback on music
during the hiatus but pair would tell the Guardian “We weren’t really in the mood to release music.”
After Mazzy Star went on hiatus in 1997, Sandoval and Roback drifted into other musical projects.
Sandoval hinted that the band was going to put out a another record in 2009 during
an interview with Rolling Stone saying "It's true we're still together. We're
almost finished [with the record]. But I have no idea what that means."
During their hiatus Roback relocated from L.A. to Norway,
collaborating with other artists and even contributing music to art installations.
In 2012, the band reunited for a tour with rumors swirling about a forthcoming album. They completed
an 18-date tour of California and Europe in 2012 with some dates in 2013 as well. Roback confirming
that the band was recording a new album called 'Seasons of Your Day.' The album was officially
released in September 2013 & it would be a career-high for the group in the UK peaking
at No. 24 on the UK albums chart and number 42 on the billboard album charts in America.
Mazzy Star’s drummer Keith Mitchell, who had played on
all four of their albums, died on May 14, 2016 after a short battle with cancer.
It had been five years since the band had reunited for a performance, and they came
together again for a three night series in 2018 at the Sydney Opera House for Vivid Live. That
gig would get media attention because some fans walked out of the performance mid-show
since the entire concert was done in the dark and concert goers expressed
their displeasure on social media. The same month, they released an EP called “Still.”
Roback kept in touch with old Opal bandmate Kendra Smith, and was working on a re-release
of Happy Nightmare Baby and a compilation of their early EPs called “Early Recordings.”
Sadly, he would pass away from cancer on Feb, 24th, 2020 before they were released.
Mazzy Star was highly influential on the direction of 2000’s pop music with the Guardian writing in a
2020 tribute article to Roback & I quote : “You could clearly detect [Mazzy Star's]
shadow ... on Lana Del Ray’s breakthrough album Born to Die, a more explicit
examination of the LA darkness that had always lurked somewhere in Mazzy
Star's sound. In turn, Del Rey went on to exert a vast influence of her own, which meant that one of
the most reticent bands in recent history ended up becoming a part of latter-day pop's musical DNA.”
Roback was mourned by many fellow musicians and the i After Roback’s death, Hope Sandoval shared
a poem on social media with the opening lines: "What will we do now?/ Now that you leave me
here/ Even though the dark blue sky is still radiant and filled with the comforting sadness
that holds us together." that does it for today's video guys thanks for watching. Be sure
to hit the like button & subscribe and we'll see you again on rock n' roll true stories. Take care.