Articles

Mazzy Star

by Frontera Magazine, 1996

If you want to understand Hope or find out what inspires her to write music, you won't have any luck with a direct approach. She's not an open or obvious person, and neither is her music. She's shy. She's private. She's genuine. She's an enigma -- not by choice, but by nature. And at the same time, her music is very personal. When you listen to her music, you get the feeling she's reading from her diary, with all the names deleted, of course.

On Mazzy Star's third, and newest, album, Among My Swan, Sandoval's haunting lyrics speak of lost love, love that never happened, love that could have been, but with just enough disinterest it almost seems to be about someone else. Listening to songs like "Disappear," "Cry, Cry," "Take Everything,""Still Cold," "I've Been Let Down" and "Rose Blood" is as close to knowing her as you're ever going to get. "Cry, cry for you/Just like you knew I wouldn't do," she croons.

You'll never get an answer one way or the other about what the songs mean to her. "I think people sort of project their own feelings into the lyrics to coincide with what's going on their lives," she says, not making any judgments about the fact. She goes on to say about the level of personalization in her songs: "I think most people, probably everybody who writes lyrics, they are talking about themselves, even if they attempt to sort of talk about their friend, it is themselves, it's their feelings, it's their opinion of the situation. So I think most people, if not everybody, is talking about themselves who write lyrics."

While some critics have expressed disappointment that Among My Swan explores no new territory musically, Sandoval has said she isn't concerned with living up to expectations now that the band has international fame. "Things are basically the same," she told Rolling Stone when the album first came out. "We're just sticking to our ways. Writing the way we've always done it. There's really no need to change."

The band's first two albums, 1990's She Hangs Brightly and 1993's So Tonight That I Might See, placed Mazzy Star firmly in the alternative rock star firmament. With the heavy MTV rotation of their video, "Fade Into You," Sandoval's angelic Chicana features became familiar to teens and college kids nationwide. The hitch is, the fact that she's Mexican-American is little known outside of East L.A., where everyone has a story about how they used to go to school with her, or with one of her siblings or cousins. In that sense, though we'd like to claim her, just knowing she's out there is enough.

So maybe it's when she seems to be saying the least that she's actually saying the most:

"You just keep playing and singing music, and it's just sort of whatever happens happens."