How Mazzy Star crafted ‘Fade into You’ in a single day
The Mazzy Star classic ‘Fade into You’ is one of those songs that barely seems like it was written at all, but rather lassoed from the ether, like an apple seed landing in a pre-determined spot so that Isaac Newton could take shelter under a fateful tree a few decades later and the wheels of the world keep turning. Newton might’ve defined gravity, but Mazzy Star did the same thing for the indie side of the 1990s. Perhaps that is not quite as impactful, but the fact that it was written in one single forlorn day only adds to the eerie sense of profundity that the otherwise meek and humble anthem holds.
The late, great songwriter Hoagy Carmichael put this concept to less rambling words when he mused: “And then it happened, that queer sensation that this melody was bigger than me. Maybe I hadn’t written it all. The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters in the studio. I wanted to shout back at it, ‘maybe I didn’t write you, but I found you’.” In short, ‘Fade into You’ holds more power than science could ever figure.
Certainly, the band themselves never intended for the track to gather such esteem. Hope Sandoval, indie’s paragon of an orchestrated enigma, has stuck to her media blackout since the song’s release, only ever offering up these words of appraisal: “I think it’s a good song.” Fair enough.
Thankfully, her bandmate, David Roback has been a bit more forthcoming. “It came almost at the same time. We weren’t trying to write a hit song – we were just writing a song,” he recalled in 2018. “I think we had a melody and a feel and we just followed that feel. And that became the song… It was acoustic guitar and both of us singing and after we’d written the song then we arranged it for other instruments – piano and slide guitar and drums. But it started out as an acoustic song.”
If anything, that all adds to the mysticism contained in the dainty anthem. Everything about it is enigmatic including the lack of words that the creators have shed about it. The song is, in essence, a symbol of Mazzy Star’s process. As Roback explained to Uncut: “We’re not so concerned about the outside world. It’s a very internal process that we’re involved in.”
Continuing: “The outside world is really not on our minds, in so far as the music is concerned. We’re really doing it in our own world for ourselves. We’re engaged in the stories of each individual song. It is its own world unto itself.” And that sense of the appreciation of unbridled creative flow shows in the seamless final product. The track is dripping with sincerity, and even if the fact that they never thought it was going to be a hit might sound like a white lie, everything else seems drenched in the depths of murky truths untold and unknown. Thank you.
