“I need to hear you say goodbye”: The inexplicable sadness of Mazzy Star
It happens again and again; the wind curses the gaps in the doorframe with its intrusive force, before raindrops begin to moisten its superficiality, seeping into the wood as if breathing new life into a place that only welcomes ghosts. It happens again—the familiarity of a moment’s wallow and the beauty that follows, as thick air and unseen immersion fill up the places burdened by emptiness, soundtracked to one perfect song by Mazzy Star.
“A stranger light comes on slowly / A stranger’s heart without a home / You put your hands into your head / And then its smiles cover your heart,” speak the words that form the second verse to ‘Fade Into You’, presenting an uncanny sadness that flows deep, flooding the curvature of the soul like crashing waves unavoidable in their verisimilitude. The comfort might be fleeting, but it emerges slowly, warming temporarily to reprieve from the earlier solitude.
‘Fade Into You’ is Mazzy Star at their most prolific, siphoned by a track so culturally embedded it feels as though it was never written at all. Rather, it’s a piece that feels like it one day emerged, already yellowed by the hands of time and draped in the dust of forgotten memories. “The outside world is really not on our minds,” David Roback once said, revealing the intrinsic darkness and sadness that belies creative processes and distracts from the murkiness of unknown truths.
This self-assured, bittersweet sentiment bleeds through Roback’s guitar work in ‘Halah’, another softened mesh of gloomy yet forthcoming questions and lamentations about loss and the afterlife. “Surely don’t stay long, I’m missing you now / It’s like I told you I’m over you somehow / Before I close the door / I need to hear you say goodbye,” Hope Sandoval sings, delicate yet heavy with yearning, anchored in an unspecified time and place like a fading sunset or highway shrouded in mist.
There is nothing explicit, nothing to hold onto in the music except fleeting emotions and ideas once attached to memories hazed by the passage of time, with images moving slowly and elusively with an almost ineffable demeanour. It’s the presence of vagueness and its emergence appearing anything but background noise, creating the kind of ambience that invites drifting between the known and unknown.
It’s charred hearts but healed scars, like a dream that dissolves the moment you wake up or a balloon that flies into the ether the moment you reach for it. It’s Sandoval’s voice in ‘Mary of Silence’ as she sings low and hypnotic, beckoning memories and feelings half-forgotten in the limbo sphere where shadows ache the soul and smoke tightens the grasp of longing.
It’s breathless nights, winded chests burdened by the lingering sense of something lost, and the beauty that can arise in moments of immense loneliness, with aesthetic pleasures forming the creases of sinister lines. It’s the peace that echoes in the notes of ‘Into Dust’ with musical arrangements that appear evocative without hinting at any singular interpretation. It’s a mind “still falling” until the pain becomes nothing, like “two strangers turning into dust.”
It’s the way all of it happens, again and again, the tragedy, beauty, and longing concocting an experience that never ends until it does, effacing itself like rain receding from the sky or wind retracting its ghostly fingers from the spaces between the door and the surrounding walls. It’s ‘Be My Angel’ and the eternal dance in the shadows, where sweetness eclipses the darkness, presenting lines only recognisable from existing in the deep, soundtracked to the inexplicable sadness of Mazzy Star.
