Hope Sandoval on how The Rolling Stones influenced Mazzy Star
There’s always been a certain yearning quality every time Hope Sandoval stepped up to the microphone. Although it’s been a long time since the glory days of Mazzy Star, the way she inhabited every song she played was always about telling a story as much as it was singing everything exactly on pitch. Being a musician was one thing, but being a performer is another, and when she first started falling in love with music, Sandoval found her true calling seeing The Rolling Stones.
Considering their pedigree as one of the longest-running bands in history, The Stones’ performance regiment may as well be second nature. Despite Mick Jagger insisting on putting himself through his paces before he even attempts to strut across the stage, Keith Richards is happy to just pick up a guitar and see where things go, always keeping that pirate aesthetic whenever he starts the lick to ‘Start Me Up’.
If anything, The Rolling Stones might be the ultimate example of what true rock performers were supposed to look like. We had already been inundated with solo artists like Elvis Presley gyrating his hips, but it always looks great when you have others to work off, and in their glory days, The Stones looked like puppies let out of a cage.
The Beatles were still fun, but they were more about playing it safe with their collared suits and swinging around their moptops of hair. The Stones were looking to make something hard-edged, and it turns out the rest of the teenage demographic was ready for someone to finally put what they were feeling to music.
Whereas Sandoval could appreciate what other classic rockers like Pink Floyd brought to the table, she thought The Stones were more in her lane, telling The Telegraph, “I was a massive Rolling Stones fan, and I wanted to play music like they were doing. There were people like Pink Floyd but the Stones are more performers. You could always be like Pink Floyd and just make music”.
Then again, it’s not like Sandoval was known for being one of the most animated performers in the world. As much as her voice can move you the second that a song like ‘Fade Into You’ starts, she tends to just keep to herself whenever she is onstage, always keeping the focus on the music rather than any showstopping performance.
But what if that kind of stance is intentional? I mean, a lot of Mazzy Star’s music was meant to be dripping with emotion from the beginning, so Sandoval deciding to do nothing might actually be more of a performance than she lets on. Compared to the other rock songs about sex and drugs, Sandoval is still putting on a performance whenever she sings, playing the role of the lovesick woman who sounds like she’s at her wit’s end trying to find some type of human connection.
It’s not like that kind of jaded character is hard to find in Stones songs, too. While they have always taken a more cynical angle when writing love songs, it’s hard not to see a track like ‘Wild Horses’ as the warm-up for this kind of aching form of rock, especially with that sighing slide guitar behind Jagger’s voice. Sandoval definitely is not going to be having Jagger’s signature moves on a whim, but once you peel back the layers of her craft, The Stones are actually a lot more important than most probably realise.
