‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: Mazzy Star, “Fade Into You”

Grunge. Wu-Tang Clan. Radiohead. “Wonderwall.” The music of the ’90s was as exciting as it was diverse. But what does it say about the era—and why does it still matter? 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for 30 final episodes (and a brand-new book!) to try to answer those questions. Join Ringer music writer and ’90s survivor Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 101 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You.” Below is an excerpt of this episode’s transcript.

Is Mazzy Star—is “Fade Into You”—slowcore? No, not really. “Fade Into You” is more dream pop, perhaps, you know? Who cares? The pretty stupid subgenre taxonomy, the Venn diagrams, the constellation of bands you’d even consider tarring with any of these pretty stupid subgenre names, the RIYL of it all, if that acronym means anything to you. (Recommended if you like, just in case that acronym means nothing to you.) Who cares about any of that, really? What I’m after here is a feeling. A super-heavy late-night feeling. An extra-mopey super-heavy late-night feeling. A super-heavy late-night moping with headphones on feeling. A super-heavy late-night moping with headphones on and preferably listening to the radio feeling. The radio part is important. The fact that “Fade Into You” is a super-mopey Top 40 hit is important. (It peaked at no. 44. Close enough.)

David Roback was born in Los Angeles in 1958; in 1981 he cofounded the band the Rain Parade—great name—which became part of L.A.’s vaunted Paisley Underground, a string of super-cool ’80s rock bands distinctly channeling ’60s psychedelic rock: the garage-iness, the jangliness, the scruffy harmoniousness, the don’t-ask-me-but-presumably-mild drugginess. You get the picture. “The Paisley Underground” is a slightly less dorky quasi-genre name than “slowcore,” at least. That song is called “What’s She Done to Your Mind”; David sings and plays guitar, but a couple of other dudes in this band sing as well, including David’s brother, Steven Roback, who played bass. The Rain Parade’s first album, Emergency Third Rail Power Trip, came out in 1983, and David Roback wrote this tune, called “Carolyn’s Song.” And this is even more of the transcendent, mellow, psychedelic late-night-headphones kinda vibe we’re looking for here.

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I get the feeling that David might’ve left Carolyn alone, feeling lost and sad. David leaves Rain Parade as well; next, he forms a band called Opal with a singer-songwriter named Kendra Smith, who’d played bass in the Dream Syndicate, one of the other big-whoop Paisley Underground bands. Opal puts out one full-length album, in 1987, called Happy Nightmare Baby—great name—this song’s called “She’s a Diamond.” Listen, this kinda music, either you leave them alone feeling lost and sad, or they’ll eventually leave you alone feeling lost and sad.

It’s not gonna be all right for long, buddy. Opal puts out this record and goes on tour, and Kendra quits the band midway through the tour. She is replaced by Hope Sandoval, a singer and guitarist born to Mexican American parents in East Los Angeles. Hope and David finish out that Opal tour and go home and start writing songs together and change the band’s name to Mazzy Star. OK, at long last, we get to hear her voice now.

That was rude of me. I apologize. The snare-drum-and-tambourine combo, the psssh psssh of it all, is going to be tremendously important to this band, but still, rude. Sorry. OK.

Hope Sandoval’s voice sounds like a slide guitar. Every note, every syllable is sliding up or sliding down or somehow sliding sideways. For as mellow, as chill, as leisurely as her voice might sound, there’s a tangible slipperiness to it. She’s on the move, always, syllable to syllable. She is evading capture. She’s made of the exact opposite of stone, and that’s all right. She is sliding in her socks in slow motion on a polished hardwood floor, with her voice. This song is called “Halah,” and it is the first song on Mazzy Star’s debut album, She Hangs Brightly, released in 1990. Chorus!

On YouTube there’s a great live version of this song from 1994, where David and Hope are on the roof of the EMI Records building in London, standing on a small green tarp ringed with plants. And David’s sitting there playing guitar with a beret and sunglasses looking as distant and as 1960s as you could possibly look in 1994, and Hope’s standing there, completely still, singing in this soft but neutron-star-dense voice, and they are both radiating absurd physical quantities of diffident cool, and they are moving as little as possible; they are exerting themselves with the bare minimum amount of exertion necessary to generate sound. It feels like they could both vanish out of existence at any time. Or maybe you will vanish.

The cover of the first Mazzy Star record, She Hangs Brightly, is just an old-timey-looking black-and-white photo of a hotel lobby in Brussels, Belgium, and I keep catching myself staring at this cover: the staircase winding upward, the swirling patterns on the floor, the ornate wire gates. Nobody’s there and nothing’s happening, but I keep staring at this photo waiting for something to happen until I realize that me staring at this photo is the thing that’s happening. This is a band that trains you to fixate on the tiniest details. This also sounds like an ultra-stoned revelation, but as we’ve established, it is very much not that at all.

The upward and downward sock slide on the word goodbye there, oof. Reverently, oof.

Those last few quick guitar chords there, it’s nothing fancy, but anything this band does that occurs at normal speed sounds like it’s going 200 miles an hour. “Halah” is also one of these songs where every time I hear it, I double-check to make sure they wrote it. Every time I hear this song, I think, Is this a Loretta Lynn song? Maybe extra-chill Janis Joplin? This welcome disorientation, this unstuck-in-time loveliness, is central to Mazzy Star’s appeal. The lyrics are less central to the appeal. The songs, really, usually, are less central to the appeal. What you want from this band is vaguely gothic dark-night-of-the-soul atmosphere, and most of the time with this band you get what you want.

Her voice. Hope Sandoval’s voice. Start there. Absolutely. Still sock-sliding on every note, morosely, gloriously, in super-slow motion. I wanna hold the hand inside you. The slightly macabre mash-note ultra-romanticism of that image. I had a college radio morning show with my good buddy Geoff for several years. The show was called The Creeping Edge of Condescension; I don’t feel like explaining that name right now, to the extent I ever could explain that name. We were polluting the airwaves from 7 to 10 a.m. two or three days a week to just deafening campus-wide indifference, but sometimes they’d play our radio station in the student athletic center, in the workout rooms, so people would be lifting weights and listening to us playing Space Ghost skits involuntarily. The weight lifters were listening involuntarily; we were absolutely playing Spaceghost on purpose.

I’m so sorry. But so one time, I’m flopped out on the couch, I’m recuperating from my usual exhausting lack of effort, and Geoff’s alone in the DJ booth. And Geoff puts on “Fade Into You,” and Geoff gets on the mic while the song’s going, and she sings the line.

And right after she sings it, Geoff goes, “Please do.” And one of Geoff’s buddies, who happened to be lifting weights in the athletic center at that precise moment, later told Geoff that all the weight lifters laughed when Geoff did that. Without question the single most successful moment of community outreach in the four-year history of our stupid radio show. I wanna hold the hand inside you is a great line, is my point. And this is an even better one.

I wanna take the breath that’s true. That’s a fantastic line. That’s the best line in the whole song. What strikes me now about “Fade Into You” is how tranquil, how steady, how unflappable it is. Across four minutes and 55 seconds that feel like six hours but could also easily go on another 24 hours, this song does not get one iota louder, or faster, or more intense. It does not escalate, it does not crescendo, it does not jump into the wedding cake, it certainly does not change key or even change facial expression, it does not call any more attention to itself in the last 60 seconds than it does in the first 60 seconds. It does not have to escalate in any fashion because you are paying the maximum amount of attention the whole time. And to my mind, an underrated element of the magic trick here, what secretly anchors your attention this whole time, is the snare drum and the tambourine. Pssh pssh. Never changes. Never draws any attention to itself. Never fails.

To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to preorder Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.